If you rely on Django or another open-source project, can you afford not to help fund it?
830 karma · joined March 13, 2015
It can take a little while to get them set up just-so, but you can use them to handle just about any scenario.
They do take different approaches, and one approach might suit you better than the other. Mezzanine is a very fine CMS, but is based on different principles and solves different problems.
If you want a Wordpress-style package that works in that kind of out-of-the-box way, perhaps Mezzanine is better for you. If you want a system that is more suited to very large sites and integration with third-party applications, probably you're better off with django CMS. (And I hope I have not mischaracterised Mezzanine by saying that.)
If you're at all interested in django CMS, try it. If you're a Django user already, you'll find it very easy to install and launch an instance: http://docs.django-cms.org/en/user-tutorial/introduction/ins....
And if you want to get a quick taste of how it works for the user: http://demo.django-cms.org.
It's always going to be an open-source standalone CMS, and nothing will change that. Even an Aldryn-based django CMS site can be made into a standalone site very easily, so django CMS will never depend on Aldryn in any way.
We're always trying to find the right balance for the way django CMS is developed. The fact that there is a team dedicated to it at Divio is what has made this step forward possible in a way that would not have been in the past.
We also continue to rely on community input and effort, and that's not going away.
Even the demo http://demo.django-cms.org (good luck getting in at the moment, though) shows how django CMS can reuse structured data from multiple applications that also integrate with its editing and publishing tools (in the demo, news, people, events, jobs, etc).
There are biomedical labs for example that use django CMS to publish information automatically. Obviously django CMS itself knows nothing about biomedical data, but it provides the tools that make it very easy to integrate those applications (which thanks to Django are themselves very quick and easy to build).
Another example: https://developer.ubuntu.com/api/scopes/cpp/current/ is part of a django CMS site - and I can assure you that that API documentation is not coming out of a FrontPage-like page builder!
We don't want to dash anyone's expectations, but the release notes do advise: "your Apple Watch is sadly unlikely to provide a very good django CMS editing experience."
It's really a kludge to define 'page types' for (say) a book - a book is a book, not a page.
So in Django you define a book, in a modular application, and then define how it's displayed or represented, which of course could include having its own page - but also allows you to connect it to all kinds of other meaningful data.
django CMS is designed to allow you to integrate such modular applications. The tutorial http://docs.django-cms.org/en/develop/introduction/index.htm... covers this, in the section "Integrating a third-party application".
Aldryn News & Blog was created from scratch, fairly recently; if you're using the Aldryn Bootstrap code, it'll all itegrate very quickly and easily.
Even if people start out being enthusiastic when building open-source projects, they quickly lose the enthusiasm if when they are faced with an on-going choice between working for nothing and earning a living.
Most successful open-source software contributors have decently-paid jobs. The people who don't get paid enough are too busy struggling to earn a living to work for nothing on top of that.
It's certainly not blaming them, or making a moral judgement. It's absolutely nothing to do with being "emotionally stunted". The gap is one of understanding, and it's a cultural one.
Since young men make up most of this industry, this tends to make the industry as a whole bad at understanding and dealing with these kinds of problems, which in turn makes it harder for the individuals in it to understand better.