Patrick Lauber: introduction to django-cms¶

Tags: django, djangocon

Django-cms was originally an application bought by http://divio.ch, but due to performance problems (mainly the menu) he started implementing a new version. The current version is 2.0 with 2.1 coming out soon. http://www.django-cms.org/

He showed a demo with the edit pages, sleek drag-and-drop, folder structure, etc. Handy: placeholders (some sort of plugin system for filling specific areas of a page). Example placeholders are text, picture, flash, google maps.

Every piece of functionality is a different application, so they separated everything nicely. Some examples:

• An important component: the menu. That’s the original reason for reimplementation: the old one was way to slow. Implemented with a set of custom template tags for (dropdown) menus and breadcrumbs.
• 2.1 brings “frontend editing”: in the normal webpage view, you can immediately edit the various placeholders (like an image or a video) when you hover over them.
• i18n-urls is an application that prefixes all your urls with a language code to allow multiple languages. (Switzerland has 4 official languages...)
• app-hooks is more or less like urls.py, but then more dynamic. This way users can move an application’s urls around in “their” url space. It also helps with the multiple languages. It is also integrated with the menu.

They’ll be sprinting on django-cms at the sprint after the conference, btw.

(About the photo: 1990 school trip to Berlin)