I'm from Torchbox, the creators and maintainers of this project. It's nice to see Wagtail back on HN. For those who saw my original Show HN post a couple of months ago, here's as overview of progress since then:<p>- Tests: stung by some of the (very reasonable) criticisms after launch, we worked hard to increase our test coverage - <a href="https://coveralls.io/r/torchbox/wagtail" rel="nofollow">https://coveralls.io/r/torchbox/wagtail</a><p>- Docs: still a way to go, but our documentation is much better, and now includes an editor's manual: <a href="http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/editor_manual/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/editor_manual/</a><p>- Translations: we were delighted by the immediate response of translators, whose work we're managing through the excellent Transifex: <a href="https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/wagtail/" rel="nofollow">https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/wagtail/</a><p>- Installation: we reduced dependencies (including Sass instead of LESS, and plain JS instead of Coffeescript, so we could drop npm); we made Redis and Elasticsearch optional; we wrote one-liners for Debian and Ubuntu; we improved the installation docs; third parties contributed Docker images.<p>- UI: we've continued to refine the interface, with feedback from our own clients as well as helpful strangers. In 0.3 we added the 'edit bird', a toolbar allowing logged-in users to add and edit pages from the site's front-end.<p>- Modularisation: Wagtail now supports alternative backends for image processing (currently PIL and Wand), searching (currently Elasticsearch and SQL) and content embedding (currently OEmbed and Embedly).<p>- Compatibility: we're working on Python 3 and Django 1.7 support. We've recently added tox to help us test multiple versions for thoroughly.<p>We're also adding features, but slowly and carefully. A form-builder and scheduled publishing should be released imminently.<p>We're very grateful for everyone's interest and contributions, even if it's just a harsh word on HN!
Quite an interesting project, and was already posted by the dev team (with a bunch more resources & info): <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164</a>
Paraphrasing Bruce McKinney on Visual Basic (who was probably paraphrasing someone else): "Django-based CMS systems make the easy easier and the hard impossible".<p>I worked with Django for about 4 years of my life, maybe more if we consider some proof-of-concept projects. Every single 'framework on top of the framework' (with the exception of Django REST Framework) I've tried has been 'almost perfect', but that little delta between what you have and perfection is impossible to bridge. Just the dependency hell introduced by some of the projects is reason enough to give up.<p>If all you want is a simple CMS with support for some markup and adding images/videos, you can throw that together using Django, the Markdown module and one of the myriad upload plugins in a couple of days. You want to provide RSS? Use the built-in feed system. You'll spend more time reading the documentation and tweaking the settings file than putting the whole thing together yourself.
At work a client wants to use Django CMS, so I considered this as an alternative, but I'm not sure how the modularity of Wagtail compares to Django CMS.<p>Can someone help me understand why I should prefer one over the other?
I have a couple of sites for friends, which I setup ages ago, for which I used Drupal - only because
a) My design skills weren't that great, and I could use a package called Artisteer to create the theme
b) It was a CMS - so my mates could just add content themselves<p>Now - turns out that the Drupal interface is still a bit confusing for people that don't care for tech. Plus, I'm having to host it on my own server. Can anyone recommend a really simple CMS I could replace it with, preferably for something I could host for free?
I made a demo here : <a href="http://runnable.com/U14o8gNBvRl84F7n/wagtaildemo-git-for-python" rel="nofollow">http://runnable.com/U14o8gNBvRl84F7n/wagtaildemo-git-for-pyt...</a><p>Run it, expand the URL written in the top box (not sure why it's not working properly).<p>Add /admin to the URL and log in with hnews/hnews for the admin area.
I've browsed the site, the documentation, repo and tutorial. I still don't know what the content model or publishing flow is.<p>I realise that the concept of a generic CMS implies DB backed with bespoke content types. However, it would be nice to know whether there are any 'first-class-citizen' types (user, profile, blog post, etc.), how pages are built or constructed (static html export? dynamic templates?), how edited content is stored and how / whether I might intermingle CMS edited content with UGC content.<p>This kind of information would be much more interesting to me than learning that the thing is "Beautiful", "Light" and "Agile".
Played with Wagtail and the first thing I wanted to find out is how to customize the wysiwyg editor. Is there any API to add / remove buttons, markup, etc? Is it possible or we're stuck with what's offered?