Recently I have evaluated a lot of web content management solutions, all of them open source, almost exclusively on Unix like systems, I haven’t seen anything as simple and elegant as Django CMS. I took it for a spin, it’s polished, really designed to solve fast turn-around web publishing needs. It does that brilliantly, no question about that. I particularly like the way they make all the authoring tools and widgets disappear when not in use, so that you are always looking at your content exactly as it will appear when published.
There is one thing, in a lot of cases, to truly appreciate any piece of work, one must have a practical understanding of the challenges involved in making it. This is also true for software. Content management, web content management isn’t a sexy topic. However, without such systems it would be tedious to maintain an online presence, difficult to consume a lot of the content produced daily by legions of people.
I was just going to use one of the web CMS products I’ve known for a long time, to power one of my web sites. In the process, I realised that I have not done any proper re-evaluation of the products available for a while. I wanted to try that first before settling on something. I thought perhaps I should go open minded about it, include a broad selection of products. As time is precious, I decided to focus on Unix/Linux based solutions for now, because that is also my target deployment platform.
For my purpose I went back to implementing a few other web CMS products, namely: Zotonic (Erlang based), Liferay Portal (JCR), Magnolia (JCR), dotCMS (JCR), several static publishing systems such as Pelican (Python), Jekyll and Octopress (Ruby), and of course WordPress (PHP, which powers this blog). Django CMS best all these in terms of simplicity and its focus on making semantic HTML content authoring a bliss. To be fair, it’s hard to compare these products I just mentioned since each actually aim to cover a breadth of needs that might be going well beyond web CMS (portal for example). But I had narrowed my scope down to the authoring and publishing processes only, web CMS functionality alone, that makes it possible to come up with a fairly reasonable comparison.
I am not yet done evaluating web content management systems, I still have on my to-do list Prismic.io (an innovative Content Repository As A Service) and a couple of .NET based web CMS.
More to come on this topic sometime later. I probably have enough material to publish a small document on this subject. We’ll see if/when I get to that. But for now, I definitely maintain that Django CMS is the most polished solution for folks looking for a simple and attractive web CMS software.