Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicksergeant | Hacker News Reader

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Sure! When I started 5 years ago, I had a single Django + Wagtail app that hosted all websites on a single monorepo/deployable. For the few sites that needed interactivity I just used vanilla JS. We actually do have a few sites that we've done some custom Stripe integrations for so they can accept payments online, but it's very minimal/simple.

About a year and a half ago I began moving everything to Next.js, and have migrated 30 sites from the Django platform and have built 20+ on the Next.js platform since building that out.

Next has allowed us to create reusable but heavily-themeable functional components that we couldn't do with Django's templating language (without a lot of boilerplate and pain), and I'm extremely happy with the move (even though I might not reach for Next on my next side project).

I do however wish I had given more attention to Astro when I was evaluating frameworks, because in hindsight it looks like a perfect fit for what we're doing. Not worth migrating now, though. Haha.

I've wanted to do something like this for years. I might have to actually stop fiddling with the idea in my head and give it a real shot in 2025.

I'm curious - how does the design process go? Do you propose a design, do they usually have a pretty complete vision or do you have templates that they can take inspiration from?

Not sure how everything works on your project, but CSS vars should allow to make almost any HTML "themable".

I've used that method with twig (php), vue and static html templates.

interesting. i love wagtail + django. sounds like you like your choice to switch to next?

Wagtail is amazing! It did everything we needed and more. My primary frustration was in building reusable server-side rendered components and "interactive islands" (as popularized by Astro). The Django/Jinja templating language can be pretty verbose and difficult to parameterize reusable functionality. I found myself constantly doing this:

``` {% with field|contact_label as label %} <div class="relative mt-5 my-3 md:my-5"> <label class="{% if placeholders %}hidden{% endif %} bg-white absolute -top-[9px] block ml-2 px-2 text-black text-sm rounded" for="{{ form_name }}_{{ field }}" id="{{ form_name }}_{{ field }}_label"> {{ label }} </label> ```

(the "with" templatetag)

Over time these templates just became very difficult to work with. Part of that is likely also because I've been a full-time React dev for the better part of a decade, and I'm just faster with it.

nice. yeah wagtail is great and so is django, but like any tech stack there are limits. i'm also skilled at react and have found a way to use react within django but it feels weird sometimes.

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