Creating Mezzanine themes, Part 1 | Hacker News Reader

Creating Mezzanine themes, Part 1

bitofpixels.com

33 pointspajju19 comments

Open articleView on HN

Part 1 — Working with Base.html http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-creating-mezzanine-...

Part 2 — The HomePage http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-2-the-homepage...

Part 3 — Pages, extra DRY http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-3-pages-extra-...

Part 4 — To the blog, and beyond http://bitofpixels.com/blog/mezzatheming-part-4-style-the-bl...

Themes developed so far: http://mezzathe.me/

Finally I love the way its going and the good patterns, its looking like the Python Wordpress. :)

A Great initiative for the whole Python and Django ecosystem. Looks like the next Python Wordpress?

I'm the author of those blog posts and I just now saw that this had made it's way onto HN, glad I could generate some discussion and good publicity for Mezzanine. Thanks for sharing it!

Title is really poorly worded and could use an edit - Django CMS is the other popular CMS project based on Django. Article is for Mezzanine, an entirely separate project. Really confusing!

Edit: title has been updated :-)

It's important to highlight that theming a Django/Mezzanine site is straightforward and does not require any special skill beyond modifying templates and styles BUT if you need to change the basic Mezzanine CMS functionality you must dive into Django.

A designer themed my own site http://www.nektra.com just customizing my Bootstrap styles and giving me templates of the main and inner pages.

I totally agree, beyond needing to understand the basics of the Django template language nothing else is required to create a Mezzanine theme.

In the blog posts this discussion is about, I did go into some detail about creating custom content types but none of that is necessary to theme vanilla Mezzanine.

edit: grammar

(Looks like this is Mezzanine not Django CMS.)

Mezzazine uses the term "django CMS" everywhere they can. I think it is to get some thunder from django CMS. Or SEO considerations.

Completely outrageous for a CMS built with Django.

I see "Django CMS" only in the title of the front page[1], the text itself doesn't have it.

[1]: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

I think the Django-CMS project kind of brought this on itself due to it's naming decision.

In fact, because of its name I was always under the impression that Django-CMS is the CMS project officially endorsed by the Django BDFLs.

I've got my own unpublished, undocumented and a bit-flaky-in-places CMS that I have always intended to release 'someday'.

So it's really interesting to look at mature projects such as this and see where their philosophy and feature-set differs from where I've ended up.

So far I've decided that what I've got is different enough and non-awful enough to at least consider open-sourcing - it's just the task of cleaning-up, documenting and marketing my project seems rather overwhelming.

And I have great admiration for anyone who gets past that barrier for their own projects.

I'd say just go for it, maybe make a basic tutorial that would explain to people how to use it then open source it.

With Mezzanine I think the community that has developed around it's google group has been key.

What's your CMS written in?

It's Django. There wasn't much around when I started it (I think there was only Django CMS).

In similar in some ways to FeinCMS in philosophy and I borrowed a small amount of code from Fein. It's not quite as cleverly coded but actually simpler in some respects (in a good way).

And there are

It looks like you comment may have been cut off, it sounds good. I'd say go for it, see if you can develop a community around!

Thanks. I have no idea how my sentence was supposed to end. :-/

Love Mezzanine and Cartridge - very clean code and easy to modify/theme.

Agree, it's the first CMS I've worked with that wasn't incredibly painful.

Modifying Cartridge to work with my payment provider was pretty straightforward, and creating a few custom Page types was super easy as well!

Creating posts with a huge photo that takes 3/4 of a 27" iMac screen is a new trend? Not sure if that is part of a Mezzanine theme, but curious to hear the opinion of others.

The referenced posts are mine, I enjoy photography and figured it was a good place to mix my hobby and profession. It's nothing specific to Mezzanine, just the particular design of my site which is coincidentally powered by Mezzanine.

Do you find it aggravating, appealing or are you ambivalent?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com