I agree with Josh. In the end it's really going to come down to balancing priorities. On my personal site I don't use any kind of content management system and have no interest in adopting one. This has left me free to do as I please without jumping through hoops to try and get things work with an often intentionally limiting CMS. At my last University we started with nothing but moved institutionally to Cascade Server (a horrible mistake if ever there was one). Still, as rotten as CS is, I was able to shoehorn a lot of web code through various mechanisms and the campus web team simply kept all the good apps and such on an application server and linked to them as needed. Of course, that meant that the pages of the site itself were pretty static and standardized, in most cases, to the point of McDevelopment, but it also allowed departmental admins to make changes without knowing a stitch of web code. I was in bad position there because I had little access to anything but the CMS, so I had to find ways to shoehorn web apps I built into the CMS and get them to work within its strictures. It didn't help that we had an upper leadership element that didn't understand the difference between a web page on our site and a purpose-built web app.
Here at RMB, we don't currently use a CMS, but my predecessor built what, in some ways, amounted to a kind of CMS for some of the content using ColdFusion. We're evaluating a move to a CMS to put broader content editing in the hands of departments so that they can take charge of more than news items and the addition of database links. We'll see how that goes. Needless to say, the good stuff will be kept far away from the CMS. The biggest advantage to that arrangement on the computing side is that someone coming in to replace me wouldn't really need to have an in-depth understanding of php (which is the main server-side script I use) to get a handle on the majority of the site. When I was hired I quickly discovered that it was fortunate I had some ColdFusion in my background, or a lot of what our site did and how it worked would have been inaccessible until I got up to speed on the language.
I guess what it comes down to for me, as we look at this decision, is how much CMS flexibility and tweakability I need for the main site, vs what I want in place for the real web apps that have been built or are underway (which I can locate separately and build using whatever framework I see fit). As such you may want to use Django as your framework on a separate application server, while employing a more normative CMS for most of your site content.
Hopefully at least some of that wasn't too trite.
Best regards,
Jason Bengtson, MLIS, MA
Head of Library Computing and Information Systems
Assistant Professor, Graduate College
Department of Health Sciences Library and Information Management
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center
405-271-2285, opt. 5
405-271-3297 (fax)
[log in to unmask]
http://library.ouhsc.edu
www.jasonbengtson.com
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On Feb 14, 2014, at 8:30 AM, Joshua Welker <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> There are two conflicting issues here. If you want ease of development,
> you want a framework. If you want ease of content creation, you want a
> CMS. As a developer, it's always my preference to go for ease of
> development and use a framework. Designing plugins and modules just sucks.
> A simple plugin like displaying dates on a page is stupidly complicated
> when you have to integrate it with the entire CMS rendering engine. But I
> have to acknowledge that it is better for me as the developer to do a
> little extra legwork than requiring all the non-techie content creators to
> do the extra legwork. That said, it isn't _too_ hard to implement a basic
> wysiwyg editor like CKeditor in most frameworks that would eliminate much
> of the difficulty for content creators.
>
> The bigger issue for me is that, when you use a framework, you more or
> less guarantee that anyone inheriting your code is going to be facing a
> steep learning curve, possibly insurmountable depending on their level of
> programming knowledge. With a CMS, there is built-in documentation and a
> support community for 95% of functionality, and then you just have to
> document the 5% or so of code that you custom wrote.
>
> Having said all that, I have to point out the amazing Yii PHP framework.
> It is so extremely easy to build a data-driven app. If you ever want a PHP
> framework, use that. For Python, I'd go with Django just because it has a
> better support community and is slightly easier than Flask for database
> functionality like ORM.
>
> Josh Welker
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Code for Libraries [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Coral Sheldon-Hess
> Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2014 6:14 PM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [CODE4LIB] Python CMSs
>
> Hi, everyone!
>
> I've gotten clearance to totally rewrite my library's website in the
> framework/CMS of my choice (pretty much :)). As I have said on numerous
> occasions, "If I can get paid to write Python, I want to do that!" So,
> after some discussion with my department head/sysadmin, we're leaning
> toward Django.
>
> Here's a broad question, re: Python and Django: If you've made the switch,
> what has your experience been? Has Django (or any other Python framework)
> given you something cool that was lacking in your previous
> language/framework/CMS? Has it helped you build something awesome? Have
> you found it enabling or limiting in any way? If you were going to sell
> people on (or against) using it, what would your arguments be? I'm a
> relative newbie to Python, and a total newbie to Django, so even if there
> was a tutorial you found useful, or some caveat you learned along the way,
> I'm interested. :)
>
> And then a more specific question: Given the following requirements, do
> you have a Django-based CMS you'd recommend? (Of course, I'll also do my
> own research, but I'd love to see what other libraries' experiences have
> been and what's popular, right now.)
> * There's a chance we'll want to offer other editors access to it, at
> some point, so it would be nice if I can provide a WYSIWYG interface,
> which I also am going to want the option to *turn off*, for my own sanity.
> * We're a Springshare-heavy library with Summon and big secret API-based
> plans, so easy JavaScript (preferably jQuery) integration is a must.
> * It should play nicely with MySQL.
> * Because I probably won't be here forever, it's of the utmost importance
> that whatever we end up with is easy to maintain.
> * I'm used to MODx's page-ID model, where I can move pages around, and as
> long as I don't delete/recreate a page (thereby changing its ID), I don't
> have to change any links anywhere else in the CMS. I'd really like
> something that will work equally well, since the odds that I'll nail the
> information architecture on the first try are probably slim. :) (Maybe
> this one should go without saying, since I know WordPress and many other
> CMSs do this, but if you have to err, err on the side of being explicit,
> right?)
> * A nice forms-builder plugin (module?) would be a great thing to have, as
> well. We use FormIt in MODx, and now I'm spoiled.
>
> And, I mean, if there's a CMS on top of another Python framework you think
> I should be considering, feel free to throw that out as a possibility,
> too!
>
> Thank you!
>
> --
> Coral Sheldon-Hess
> http://sheldon-hess.org/coral
> @web_kunoichi
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