Django CMS, Wagtail and Mezzanine - all very quiet

Django and CMS. There seems to be a lack of interest in the top 3 CMSs (wagtail, django cms and mezzanine) in djangoland in general.
I can find only one reference to Mezzanine over on Discord.
Over here Django Packages : CMS the django versions appears to have stopped being updated (in the table) at 2.x.
I did a udemy course on mezzanine (old - created in 2018) and it just fizzled out e.g. the ecommerce bit ended “the next lesson is payments”. There was no next lesson. And the advanced section didn’t even start.

On this forum most CMS topics end with a chap basically saying - don’t bother, just use wordpress.

Appreciating Django isn’t a blogging platform I’m curious why the lack of interest in adding CMS functionality.

<opinion>
Wagtail and DjangoCMS are definitely active and well-thought-of products. They have their market niche. You’ll never see me say anything negative about either of them.

However, choosing them is an investment in time and effort. If you are working in an area where they are the right choice, they’re definitely the right choice. But I don’t see either of them as being the best solution for a simple site to be owned and operated by a sole-proprietor or partnership-type company.

Everyone should be choosing the right product for their needs. I happen to be a fan of the Dodge Ram 1500 pickup truck - but I’m not going to buy one as the family sedan.

If all you’re looking for is a blogging platform, or to stand up a “brochure-ware” site, then yes, I’m going to recommend different products. Why? Because from where I sit, those other products are the right tool for those jobs.

(Side note: I don’t say this because I think those tools are necessarily “better” in any technical sense, it’s because the ecosystems surrounding them are more comprehensive and mature - making those products more approachable by those less technically inclined.)

As to why there’s not a lot of activity about them here, I can only guess that it’s because each of those products have their own support channels. Django-CMS has a discourse forum at https://discourse.django-cms.org/ among other resources, and Wagtail likewise has a variety of support channels.
</opinion>

Thanks Ken, and yes you are the “just use wordpress” guy. Hope I don’t need to “lawyer up”.
You are of course correct. For most simple sites wordpress etc are fine.

I’m building a ‘proper’ Django application - a mapping database with GeoPackage uploading, spatial queries using PostGIS etc but which also has the normal website stuff. Namely, home, about, contact, articles (blog) etc. That’s where the CMS could be handy.

The first time I ever used django it was pre v1. Or v1 had just come out. And I handbuilt a CMS for a novel looking website - couldn’t have managed it without Django. Just discovered the site still just about works on the wayback machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120227142958/http://www.feonic.com/#flat-panel-speakers

But handbuilt CMS today? Not so sure. Too many features to worry about. Things like Featured Image, Thumbnails, Galleries, WYSIWYG editing etc etc. I’m sure there are plugins/apps for all the usual stuff but a CMS would just work.

I’m tempted by Mezzanine as it uses the Django Admin and I think this will fit with the other Models/Views I’ll be using for the mappy stuff.

But jquery and bootstrap3…cripes. I really want to use Vue/Vuetify for frontend. Maybe wagtail would be more open… may end up rolling my own CMS again.

PS the djangocms discourse has 5 topics so far this year. Crikey.

Hi Parthian.

Core maintainer of Wagtail here.

Wagtail (CMS) is very active and has major support from its primary sponsor plus has recently had many new features paid for from key sponsors like Google, NHS and Motley Fool.

For your use case, it sounds like you may only need vanilla Django but if you want to provide a nice admin UI for your users (non-devs) to manage the content of your website-ish pages then Wagtail is worth a look.

It mostly stays out of the way and let’s you use Django as is. There is a thin layer around the URL routing and also you may need to change the url path of your Django admin.

One of the nice features is the ability to create a CRUD interface on any other model really easily through Wagtail’s Snippets or ModelAdmin system.

It’s also good to read the Zen of Wagtail to see where it ‘fits’ and to determine if it’s helpful for your project.

https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/reference/contrib/modeladmin/index.html
https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/getting_started/the_zen_of_wagtail.html

Have fun

1 Like

Thanks for that @lbee. Went with Mezzanine as it appeared to most closely match Django Admin. That may be incorrect information.

Stripped out jQuery and Bootstrap and replacing with Vue/Vuetify. Making progress.

Would really need to try all 3 CMSs to be certain which is best for my project. Will look at Wagtail later.

I think that these projects are very active and since several years.
You can have a sense of that through Django Packages : CMS . Also I think that most devs interested in these projects will follow commits on github or discuss in other places like slack, discord, … For Django-cms, the dcA association is very active with weekly conference calls, very welcoming community on slack and now they hired a developper for increased effort.

Hi @Parthian, I’m tech lead for django-cms. I know this is a bit of a late reply, but someone found this post & shared it on our slack today.

You’re right, our discourse is very quiet. So is our Discord. I think that’s even quieter. But don’t judge us on those. Our slack is where the majority of activity is and as @rolandf said, we have bi-weekly calls which anyone in the community is welcome to join.

Join us on slack if you like.

With django-cms you can integrate your existing django apps into the system via what we call app hooks. These apps can be attached to pages, and you can have multiple instances of an application to meet different purposes. For example, I’ve got a site where I use djangocms-blog differently on 3 pages.

There’s a lot going on as this year we’re working to release the next major version to pypi. 4.0 has been in development for a number of years following the backing of a sponsor to essentially rewrite what was created in version 3 to create an enterprise level platform with a much smaller core and the ability to add the apps you need for your use case. We’re working on making that public release 4.1 hopefully before the end of the year, or early next year.

If you’re interested in using a JS frontend for a CMS, one of our core team wrote a little about this; How to Use React with djangoCMS 3.5.2 and above?

I’d also recommend taking a look at djangocms-frontend which is a fairly new app written by our (recently appointed) fellow which lets you build your page content using CSS frameworks like bootstrap 5. I’ve been using this with a v4 project but it is also compatible with v3.

We’ve got a quick-start project if you’d like to take a look; django-cms-quickstart

Or I have two example projects for v3 and v4 (although please remember v4 is pre-release so we may make breaking changes in the run up to that 4.1 public launch)

marksweb/django-cms-3
marksweb/django-cms-4

3 Likes