Comment by FilterJoe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FilterJoe | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Mezzanine is quite nice: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

It's Python (a Django app). BSD license. It has many advantages over Wordpress that I won't get into here, but all this is offset by one massive disadvantage: It rests on the Django framework.

Django is a nice framework for web development but it takes at least a few months to learn for someone starting from scratch. The installation process for Mezzanine requires some Django knowledge.

Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge. A reasonably intelligent person can teach themselves Wordpress basics in days (the basics of self-hosted Wordpress, selecting a theme, selecting key plug-ins, etc.). No PHP required.

With Wordpress, it's not too difficult to select a provider (i.e. Bluehost) and have Wordpress automatically installed within minutes using Simple Script. If Mezzanine could be automatically installed like this, I think it would quickly become a popular and much more maintainable alternative.

> Installing Wordpress on the other hand requires zero PHP knowledge.

I don't disagree with your intent - it's critical to have a quickstart option for people who aren't primary developers - but there's a downside to this: a comically high percentage of exploited sites are Wordpress because it's not trivial to secure or stay updated.

That's a much harder problem to solve since you really need an automatic updater but the odds of something requiring human attention during an upgrade are high.

Your statement is patently false in two spots: One, WordPress is not a "comically high percentage" of exploited sites (presumably vs other CMS'?) - I challenge you to prove that (besides the problem of defining 'comically' for these purposes).

Two, WordPress is trivial to update, both for the core software, as well as for plugins. It's literally a two-click process to update with a constant reminder in the UI that updates are available.

I've built and manage dozens of WordPress sites at all levels, and in the few encounters I've had with compromised sites, 100% of the time it is because the end user has been willfully lazy about clicking the update button in the software.

Security is about people.

Mezzanine contains a fabric installation that can take a vanilla ubuntu install, and have a production server up and running with Postgres, memcached, et al, in a single command:

http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/deployment.html#fabric

I believe this is actually easier than deploying Wordpress to production.

Very cool - I didn't know about this. However, this still presupposes you have a local Python/Django/Mezzanine installation. Simple for a Django web developer, probably not too bad for a non-Django web developer - but it's a bit much to expect a non Developer to set up Python, Django, and Mezzanine on their local system.

On the other hand, I see a way to make this simple for a non developer. Set up a virtual machine with everything all set up. Then all the end user would have to do is download VMware or virtualbox. Then download the VM image with Ubuntu/Django/Mezzanine/Fabric. And then you'd be approaching the same level of simplicity of getting started with self-hosted Wordpress.

Nice Stephen, was hoping to see you in this conversation.

I think this all comes down to really the fact that 2$ hosts have php installed by default and probably don't have shell.

Some cloud providers have auto-installers, its all paid though.

Can you name 1 or more cloud providers that have auto installers for Mezzanine? I'm not aware of any. Here's a post from 4 months ago comparing installing Mezzanine on a number of PaaS providers. None seemed anywhere close to as simple as installing Wordpress on Bluehost:

http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o...

Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time.

> Read the comments and you'll find out that Mezzanine isn't yet compatible with Django 1.5, causing headaches for those trying to install it for the first time.

Django 1.5 came out less than a month ago. Given the size of Mezzanine, it's not surprising that it hasn't been upgraded immediately.

I'm not sure why this would effect the install process, either: any host that can handle Django apps is likely to have both 1.4 and 1.5 available at the very least.

Mezzanine lead developer here.

We'd been tracking Django 1.5 changes during the release candidates and were mostly compatibile with it up until its release. When it was released, a few issues cropped up - those were resolved within a day or two, so there was a brief period where it was incompatible with 1.5, but that's no longer true.

So it was incompatible with 1.5 for less than 48 hours. Latest version works fine against 1.5, enjoy :-)

Thanks for piping in - unfortunately I'm too late to edit my 1.5 comment.

Can you describe the easiest way for non-developers to get started with Mezzanine? Is there a way to do it that doesn't involve installing Python, Django, virtualenv, Mezzanine, other apps, etc.?

Ross Laird wrote an absolutely beautiful Mezzanine tutorial geared towards new developers:

http://rosslaird.com/blog/first-steps-with-mezzanine/

That's part one, there are several on his site.

I agree, Ross's tutorial is brilliant. Unfortunately it stops right before deployment. For a new developer, or someone who is tech savvy, but not a programmer - deployment can be a maze. I installed Mezzanine on a VPS, something I'm sure is fairly common - so the localhost wasn't available - so that complicated things a bit. Got mod_wsgi working with apache, but not with Mezzanine. Anyway, not to turn this into a support query or anything - but I think deployment is tricky. Ross ended up shooting over some code snippets and I was very grateful for them, but would love to see deployment covered in the same way he did the other parts of the tutorial if there are any takers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com