A Comprehensive Guide to Django CMS

Django CMS is a free and open-source content management system built on top of the Django framework. It provides an excellent way to build robust and scalable websites with a high degree of flexibility.

One of the key benefits of Django CMS is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other Django applications, allowing developers to leverage the strengths of both worlds.

Django CMS is highly customizable, with a wide range of plugins and extensions available to suit various needs.

Django CMS is a powerful content management system that offers a wide range of features to help you build and manage your website.

It features hierarchical pages, which allow you to organize your content in a structured and easy-to-navigate way.

With extensive built-in support for multilingual websites, you can reach a global audience and cater to different languages and cultures.

Multi-site support is also available, making it easy to manage multiple websites from a single dashboard.

Draft/publish workflows enable you to work on content in draft mode and publish it when it's ready, reducing the risk of errors and saving time.

Version control is also built-in, allowing you to track changes and collaborate with others on content updates.

A sophisticated publishing architecture is at the heart of Django CMS, making it easy to integrate with other applications and use in your own projects.

Frontend content editing is another key feature, giving you the flexibility to edit content directly on the page without needing to go back to the admin interface.

A hierarchical content structure for nested plugins is also available, making it easy to organize and manage complex content.

An extensible navigation system is built-in, allowing you to create custom navigation menus and integrate with other applications.

SEO-friendly URLs are also generated automatically, helping your website rank higher in search engine results.

Here's a quick rundown of the key features:

Django CMS has a robust documentation system, maintained by a dedicated working group. They ensure that documentation is available for several project versions.

The key versions of the project are stable (default), which represents the current release version, and latest, representing the latest build of the develop-4 branch.

Documentation is hosted courtesy of Read the Docs, making it easily accessible to users.

When working with your application, you'll want to know the helpful commands that can make your life easier.

You can configure your hosting environment to run the following command on every deployment: ./manage.py migrate.

The Divio CLI offers several commands to interact with your application. These commands, combined with Docker and Docker Compose, provide powerful tools to manage your application.

Here are a few of the most useful commands:

Django CMS has a rich history that spans several years, with a major rewrite in 2016.

The system was completely rewritten by Patrick Lauber, building on a fork of django-page-cms.

As of 15 September 2016, django CMS 3.4 introduced a Long Term Support (LTS) release cycle, which provides stability and predictability for users.

This LTS release cycle has been a game-changer for the project, allowing users to plan their development and deployments with more confidence.

In 2018, django CMS 3.5 was released, introducing a structure board decoupled from page rendering and offering Page copy between sites, compatible with Django 1.8 to 1.11.

This update brought significant improvements to the system's flexibility and usability.

The project has continued to evolve, with django CMS 3.7 introducing Django 2.2 support in 2019, and Django 3.0 support in 2020.

In July 2020, Divio handed over responsibility for the open-source project to the newly founded django CMS Association (dCA), marking a new chapter in the project's history.

Divio remains committed to django CMS as a sponsor of the django CMS website and as one of the founding members of the dCA.

If you're looking for professional support for your Django CMS project, you're in luck. Choose from a list of trusted tech partners of the Django CMS Association to get your website project delivered successfully.

Deploying your Django CMS app is a straightforward process. You can configure your hosting environment to run a specific command on every deployment: `./manage.py migrate`.

If you're using Divio Deployment, it's the quickest way to deploy your project. You can find a video tutorial and a description of the deployment steps on their website.

To deploy your app, you'll need to provision your application first. Once that's done, press the Deploy button on the Test environment to start the deployment process. This will build the Docker image from the Dockerfile and launch a Docker container from the image.

The deployment process typically takes a couple of minutes, depending on the complexity of your application. After it's complete, the Control Panel will indicate that the deployment was successful with a "Last deployment succeeded at..." message.

Here are the deployment steps for Divio Deployment:

Please note that the admin user is not created automatically, so you'll need to connect via SSH and manually run `./manage.py createsuperuser` to set it up.

Django CMS handles multilingual content by default. This means that you can easily create and manage content in multiple languages within the same project.

Its administration interface supports several languages, making it a great choice for international teams or projects that cater to diverse audiences.

Transifex is used to manage the translations of the project, ensuring that your content is accurately translated and up-to-date.