FeinCMS

FeinCMS offers a CMS (Content Management System) for a hierarchy of pages, and tools which allow you to build your own CMS on top of Django easily if the standard page module does not fulfil your needs.

When was the last time, that a pre-built software package you wanted to use got many things right, but in the end, you still needed to modify the core parts of the code just because it wasn't (easily) possible to customize the way, a certain part of the system behaved?

Django came to rescue all of us, who were not happy with either doing everything on our own or customizing another software package until it was impossible to update.

The biggest strength of a framework-like design is, that it tries not to have a too strong view of what the user should do. It should make some things easy, but just GET OUT OF THE WAY most of the time.

Just after discovering the benefits of a framework-like approach to software design, we fall back into the rewrite everything all the time mindset and build a CMS which has very strong views how content should be structured. One rich text area, a media library and some templates, and we have a simple CMS which will be good enough for many pages. But what if we want more? If we want to be able to add custom content? What if the user can't be trusted to resize images before uploading them? What if you'd like to add a gallery somewhere in between other content? What if the user should be able to administer not only the main content, but also a sidebar, the footer?

With FeinCMS, this does not sound too good to be true anymore. And it's not even complicated.

FeinCMS is an extremely stupid content management system. It knows nothing about content -- just enough to create an admin interface for your own page content types. It lets you reorder page content blocks using a drag-drop interface, and you can add as many content blocks to a region (f.e. the sidebar, the main content region or something else which I haven't thought of yet). It provides helper functions, which provide ordered lists of page content blocks. That's all.

Adding your own content types is extremely easy. Do you like textile that much, that you'd rather die than using a rich text editor? Then add the following code to your project, and you can go on using the CMS without being forced to use whatever the developers deemed best:

::

    from feincms.module.page.models import Page
    from django.contrib.markup.templatetags.markup import textile
    from django.db import models

    class TextilePageContent(models.Model):
        content = models.TextField()

        def render(self, **kwargs):
            return textile(self.content)

    Page.create_content_type(TextilePageContent)

That's it. Not even ten lines for your own page content type.

Requirements:

• Python
• django_mptt > 0.2.1
• tagging > 0.2.1