DanieleProcida

This is probably getting a bit detailed for a Hacker News thread, but I'd be happy to take this elsewhere.

Your feedback has been very helpful and is much appreciated.

We're on https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom amongst other places, but that's the easiest way to speak to us directly if you like.

Thanks again.

If you're having any trouble getting to grips with it, don't hesitate to drop us a line - on our live help system if you wish: https://www.divio.com/en/#intercom

Otherwise, both https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit... and the Guided Tour https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-gui... will help.

It's ironic that what's behind WordPress's fabled ease-of-deployment (i.e. allowing third-party code to be downloaded an executed) is also what's behind many of its security weaknesses.

Doing that is pretty much impossible in Django.

We have much more complete documentation for developers http://docs.django-cms.org and tutorials for beginners https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit....

Lord no! If you want to move that image up a couple of paragraphs, then (in structure mode) you drag the plugin to its new desired place. Done.

The Help section in the sidebar with mini video introductions explains that.

See step 6 (using the Content Wizard to create a new weblog article for example, including body content) or step 7 (which explains how to switch to structure mode, another way to add and/or rearrange body content).

Existing body content can be edited simply by double-clicking on it while in edit mode.

The question is whether this is just a case of understanding the basics of a different paradigm, or something that could be made more intuitive.

Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for taking the trouble to look at it.

At the moment, the WordPress market economy is based largely on small margins over very large quantities. django CMS definitely isn't in that space, or even aiming for it, right now.

In the meantime though, we know that django CMS is a serious choice of Python/Django agencies and large corporations and other organisations.

You can see django CMS mentioned in job advertisements on a regular basis.

A surprising number of large corporate websites use django CMS.

There are numerous businesses in Europe and the USA that are django CMS specialists, building websites including CMS components for their clients, all based on django CMS.

django CMS is a free open-source product, but has paid developers working on it full-time.

Finally, it's sufficiently well-known and well-used to warrant the creation of Aldryn, a cloud deployment platform that was built around serving django CMS (even if now it also serves Django more widely).

Again, it's not the scale of economy that exists around WordPress (but then what is?), and there are many things that we hope will grow over the next few years, such as a thriving marketplace of not just free open-source but also paid-for addon applications, and even competitors to Aldryn.

So the answer is yes, in a word.

Your comment (if it's the one) was simply waiting to be approved in Disqus moderation.

We won't reject comments unless they are offensively rude, spam, wildly off-topic or otherwise significantly problematic.

We can withstand a little bit of criticism...

Just to gather some of the other comments together, if you're a Django developer already, then you're used to more difficult deployments.

So anything that goes in the direction of easier (WordPress-style if you wish) deployments is going to be a big bonus for the Python/Django developers who are already committed to the language or the framework, and is going to be a big win for the service that can provide it.

I don't think I am giving away any of grand secrets if I say that that's what we're doing (and trying to do more of) - be a first choice for Django/Python developers.

For the Django developers, it doesn't need to be as easy as WordPress - it just needs to be easier than the other options (which seem to begin with hammering bits together by hand until you have a working server, sometimes).

(That may not be enough to bring in users who may have gone for WordPress, but that's a further ambition.)

In the meantime, easiness really is important, which is why I think there is so much to learn from WordPress's success, but ease-of-deployment is definitely not the only thing that's important.

For example, I don't think it's an unfair comment to say that one flaw WordPress has is security, and that Django/django CMS/Aldryn are much more secure, and that alone should be something people think about.

Or: there's more to hosting than dumping some files into a web server's directory. New deployment technologies such as Docker make it possible for a Django site built on Aldryn to be taken away and hosted somewhere else in minutes - being able to migrate your deployments if you wish to isn't an eye-catching advantage, but it's really valuable from a business point of view.

Or yet again, Docker makes it possible for a cloud hosting platform such as ours to be way more than just a hosting or deployment platform. It's also a development platform, with tools that integrate the desktop and the cloud and make the work of the experienced application developer easier, not just that of the non-technical person who wants a new site.

Anyway, that's a slightly long-winded way of saying that the lesson from WordPress is extremely valuable, but the way it applies to Django doesn't mean that we have to compete on WordPress's terms!

OK, thanks! That's very interesting feedback.

I'd be extremely interested from a wholly self-interested point of view to know what you think of http://demo.django-cms.org/ (for an out-of-the-box demo of django CMS), and whether you'd find that as quick to get to grips with as WordPress).

Or if you would like to compare it with actually working on the site as a developer rather than just as a content editor, then it would be https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit....

What further improvements would take it right up to, or even past, WordPress levels of ease-of-use, in your opinion?

It works with Python 3 too!

WordPress is easy to start using, is fun and rewarding, makes people feel they've managed to get something done, works out of the box.

That is what competing systems have to beat. I do think that our own django CMS https://django-cms.org is a better system than WordPress - more elegant, more secure, more extensible and scalable.

But it's not enough to be proud of our beautiful internals, we have to give the ordinary, non-expert user a good experience too, and make them feel in charge of the system from the start. That's why we admire WordPress and want to beat it (and who would want to beat something that they sneer at - it seems a low ambition!).

I'm not so sure, I understand Model-View-Template much better than I understand Model-View-Controller.

And for a real beginner, what a view is doesn't matter at all; what matters is how quickly they can start to feel they understand what they are doing with the system.

Do you mean WordPress? Sure, of course it shouldn't escape critical scrutiny, but people actually sneer at it (and PHP generally, and worse, at PHP programmers).

There's a lot to learn from WordPress and PHP.

It removed an exclamation mark!

I wouldn't agree with any of that, especially not the first part!

We even have a tutorial series especially aimed at non-Python programmers: https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit...

The trickier part is deployment, which is where WordPress (all PHP, really) truly shines for ease-of-use - and this is where our Docker-based Aldryn Cloud platform intends to bridge the gap, by making that just as easy for Python/Django users.

Docker doesn't do it automatically, of course, but it makes it easier to to build systems that make easier deployment and hosting possible.

Well if I'd known Hacker News was going to repunctuate my title I'd have done it differently!

Sorry if you had any problems with our demos - it turned out that the A/B testing tool we had on the form was sometimes raising a 403 error - we've deactivated it and all is working smoothly now.

Django takes security extremely seriously: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.9/topics/security/.

Any Django application that follows good practices and doesn't do anything daft will inherit those security benefits.

Django doesn't permit overwriting of its own program files for update procedures, for example, which some systems to.

(A CMS is by nature slightly more vulnerable, because of the potential for mishandling user-submitted content.)

OK, really sorry about that. We're working on it back here, we can definitely see a caching issue somewhere in the pipeline. Would you try once more in incognito mode?

I think it's a temporary cache-related glitch. Can you try deleting your browser cache, or simply trying again?

It's working for me here, anyway...

Try them all! They take different approaches, and one might suit you better than another.

django CMS has addon applications for both jobs (Aldryn Jobs) and weblogs (Aldryn News & Blog).

If you're interested, you can join a free Guided Tour each week that will actually cover some how this all works in django CMS: https://www.divio.com/en/academy/aldryn-cloud-django-cms-gui...

For a fully-blown jobs site by the way you'd probably want to expand the Jobs application but it's open source software already so could be a good start.

Thanks Jon!

Django's been around for a pretty long time. Projects like Django and Rails need each other. If there were just one dominant web application framework, it would stagnate.

No, it does begin to ensure it. It doesn't do the whole job, you need others to do it too, but it's a necessary step.

Using software you pay for, or pay for software you use? In the end, the money goes to the same place.

Thanks, that is a very interesting insight. We'll see what we can do with it...

Also, the more people who enjoy the bag of chips, the better, unlike with actual chips.