CMS comparison

This page contains notes on integrating an Oscar site with a CMS.

Features of particular note (taken from RFPs I've seen):

• Can pages be published on certain date ranges
• Can pages go through an approval work-through
• In-page, WYSIWYG editing
• Multi-language support
• Easy integration with Oscar's products, cateogories etc. Eg, can we embed hero-product block, carousels - that kind of thing easily in CMS-controlled pages
• Can the CMS be used to control content within a non-CMS page. Eg on a category listing page.
• Audit trails of actions
• Form builders and data export
• Manual control of URLs
• Asset management (images, files, videos etc)
• Calendar functionality

Things to try and implement:

• Standalone CMS-controlled tree of pages (with nav, breadcrumbs)
• CMS-controlled homepage
• CMS-controlled areas in product/category pages
• Integration with Oscar's products

Mezzanine

Details:

• Tested with v1.4.10
• Branch: cms/mezzanine

Installation:

• Not obvious how to install into an existing project (eg you can't use their createdb command). You have to pick lots of settings from their template project. Clearly intended to be used standalone.
• Has a template clash with Oscar as they both define a base.html. Hence Mezzanine's pages don't show up as Oscar's base.html takes precendence. Need to tweak a couple of Oscar's layout templates to extend oscar/base.html to work around this. Thank goodness Oscar is so flexible!
• Some URL paths clash with Oscar's (eg /search/)

FeinCMS

Installation:

• Easy to set-up and get working. The registering of content-types feels a little weird though.

Notes:

• Dashboard runs within the admin (difficult to integrate into Oscar's dashboard, probably)

Django-CMS

Details:

• Tested with v2.4.3
• Branch: cms/django-cms

Installation:

• Quite involved to install but not too bad.
• It requires clobbering base.html so the Sekizai tags can be used (they don't work in overridden blocks).
• Fairly straightforward to add breadcrumbs and menu entries

Notes:

• Uses the admin for page creation and management
• Has a slick in-page editing facility

Gotchas:

• The slug of the first page in the list is ignored (as it is treated as the homepage).
• The admin shows a JS alert warning of unsaved plugins even tho they are saved.

Wagtail

Details:

• Tested with v0.3
• Branch: cms/wagtail

Quite slick dashboard but wants to own the whole site (ie manage users and that kind of thing). Might be tricky to marry with Oscar's dashboard.

Does have:

• Nicely designed dashboard
• Asset manager
• Moderation workflow

Doesn't have (AFAICT):

• Date-based publishing
• In-page editing
• i18n support

Installation

• No instructions for installing from scratch - only notes on forking away from a demo site.
• Templates need SCSS by default
• Got stuck when asked for a page-type to create...

FancyPages

Opps

URL: https://github.com/opps/opps