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Comment by randlet | Hacker News Reader

Congrats on the 1.0 release! This looks very polished and a strong contender for the king of the django cms's title.

I've been evaluating Django cms's over the last couple days and have narrowed it down to Mezzanine or django-cms. Would love to hear if anyone (especially developers from either package) has any compelling arguments for one vs the other.

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Thanks randlet!

I can't really comment objectively on Django CMS, as I've had no exposure to it. Too busy working on Mezzanine.

I did at one point take at look at their page model, which I imagine in both projects is the heart of the CMS. It was a relative mess compared to Mezzanine's, which has always strictly strived to keep a painstakingly clean code base and design, to make jumping in and hacking on as easy as possible.

I've also seen a lot more complaints from frustrated Django CMS users than I have with Mezzanine, many of those who have come to Mezzanine afterwards and really enjoyed it. But that is most likely a result of Django CMS being much more popular - something Mezzanine has a much harder time achieving without a generic name :-)

But please, take that comparison with a grain of salt. Go ahead and try both!

It does looks good. I need a BLOG system and have been working on rewiring django-article module to have the twitter-bootstrap and lot of other modifications. After reading the feature list of MZ, I was ready to make the switch but when I tried it out and saw the system missing the features I needed, I decided to stay with what I got. - writing article in Textile/Markup/restructured text - thumbnail generation

side-note: How about a rename to something with django in it? i.e Better Django CMS?

Personally, Mezzanine does not rolls right off my tongue and my brain is just refusing to memorize it.

There's a third party app that integrates Markdown into Mezzanine: https://bitbucket.org/onelson/mezzanine-mdown

Mezzanine also contains automated thumbnailing for any images at the template level: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/packages.html#mezzanine.core....

Can't help you out with the project name however, sorry :-)

This completely beside the point, but Mezzanine immediately struck me as a wonderful project name - exotic and at the same time mundane. Congratulations for a 1.0 release!

I haven't tried mezzanine, but I'd recommend against Django CMS. Using Django CMS, we were finding it took 3-4 seconds for the server to render a page, particularly if pagination is involved (e.g., galleries). I'm sure at least part of this is our fault, since we didn't spend a lot of time trying to optimize this.

We are now using Hyde, which is incredibly flexible (it's just files) and which is about as fast as a CMS can get (hyde is statically generated). I recommend taking a look.

We are currently working to more tightly integrate django with hyde (i.e., share templates, {% url foo %} across both worlds).

I have been working with Mezzanine for close to a year and a half now and it has been great. The community is awesome and Steve (and others) are very responsive and helpful on the mailing list. I really like page_processors (http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/content-architecture.html#pag...) which allow you to easily add additional functionality on a per slug or per model basis. You can also specify templates on a per slug or per model basis. The simplicity, ease of getting started and ease of modifying Mezzanine push it beyond the competition IMHO. It takes care of plenty of things for you and gets out of your way and lets you develop when you need it to.

Note: I don't actually have much/any experience with Django-CMS so I can't make a fair comparison.

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