Over the years, DataMade has employed several CMS platforms:
- The Django admin site for BGA Payroll and BGA Pensions
feincms3for the IHS Website Redesign- Django CMS for Neighborhood Opportunity Fund
- Wagtail for LISC CDNA and the Lugar Center Oversight Index
We discuss each of these in turn below.
To facilitate deeper and more equal knowledge of CMS practices at DataMade, and thus speed up development time and improve maintainability, we should pick a single CMS tool and systematize its use.
Our pick is Wagtail, for the following reasons:
- Wagtail offers a superior developer experience, from installation to customization.
- Wagtail offers a superior user interface for a variety of content management tasks.
- Wagtail has robust and reliable documentation.
- Wagtail has a broad user base and healthy plugin ecosystem.
The Django admin site comes with Django out of the box, and as such, it "just works", no installation required. It is also reasonably well-documented, and—like the rest of the Django ecosystem—it has a healthy and helpful userbase, making it easy to track down blog posts and StackOverflow threads for edge cases and errors that aren't covered by the documentation.
Predictably, the Django admin interface offers a no-frills but functional interface for managing Django models. It can also be extended fairly easily to support custom administration tasks, such as flushing the cache.
However, the Django admin site can be difficult to navigate for clients who are less intimately familiar with the underlying data model, in particular for applications that use highly normalized data. The Django admin site also does not offer a rich text editor. For these reasons, we've had to compile extensive documentation for client use of the Django admin site, with only limited adoption in the long term.
feincms3 is an extension of the Django admin interface that's optimized for
managing more complicated content hierarchies, e.g., nested pages. It has
fairly complete documentation,
plus a helpful example application.
However, the developer experience is mixed. In particular, feincms3 implements
only abstract classes and mixins,
so standing up an instance requires a certain familiarity with these concepts,
which isn't always true of newer developers.
The user interface is similar to the Django admin interface, with the added
ability to organize content in a tree editing interface. Unfortunately, this
interface is slightly confusing, and it doesn't always behave as expected.
feincm3 also has an optional CKEditor integration, enabling rich text
editing, but the documentation for django-ckeditor
is sparse and configuration can be cryptic. Moreover, because CKEditor supports
so many kinds of content editing, none of them offer an excellent user
experience.
Unlike Wagtail and Django CMS, feincms3 does not offer documentation for
content editors. For this reason, and because the user interface isn't terribly
straightforward, we've had to write especially detailed documentation for
clients to successfully manage content on their own.
Wagtail and Django CMS are both third-party systems built for use on top of Django, but they ask developers to employ substantially different modes of thinking. The way the two CMSs structure their data across views and models is quite different.
Django CMS operates with plugin-based abstractions, where pages are build from discrete reusable units. It has some recommended default plugins, like a text box and image field, and the ability to build and insert custom plugins.
While Django CMS's large community-built plugin library initially looked promising, we found that both third-party and default plugins for basic functions, such as rich text boxes to allow users to input and style text, had confusing interfaces and were often buggy.
While Django CMS offers greater flexibility and encourages users to simply click on section of a page to change it, in practice this was overwhelming for users. With so much flexibility, plus the UI bugs outlined above, we've again needed to write extensive documentation for clients.
Wagtail is an open source CMS built by Torchbox. It's straightforward to set up while initiating a Django project, and it is also possible— though more time consuming—to add to an existing Django project.
In contrast to Django CMS, Wagtail relies on template-based abstractions. It encourages developers to write reusable templates with different page layouts, and has a useful StreamField model that allows flexibility in pages built from the same template.
In terms of user experience, we found Wagtail's backend interface to be the easiest of the options reviewed for content managers to pick up. Wagtail intentionally separates page design from content management in a way that usefully restricts users from changing too many pieces of a page at once. It also has strong editor-focused documentation, which we've been able to share with clients in addition to our custom documentation.
Wagtail's documentation for developers is clear and reliable, though sometimes brief. They also have a live demo, which we've found implements some tricks not covered in the official documentation. As mentioned above, Wagtail also has a robust and growing plugin ecosystem.