leveltwo Business Architects

As part of my job as Lead Web Developer, I am required to come up with the proper tool for whatever job we’re handed. Whether it be choosing a framework for a web application, or figuring out which CMS to use for a promotional site, the choices that I have to make seemingly never end. It doesn’t help that making those choices are not easy, especially when it comes to CMS’s.

We’ve tried many different content management systems here at Level2Designs, with various results. ExpressionEngine, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla...the list goes on and on. With each one of those, we’ve had mixed success. They have their strong points, but they also have their weaknesses, and the weaknesses are CRIPPLING. Weaknesses cause us to take much longer on a project than we need to. I don’t like to waste time or our client’s money, so content management system limitations make me very angry. And you won’t like me when I’m angry .

This anger, however, has driven me to try something new (well, sort of new). The most successful, expandable, and non-headache-making content management system we’ve ever integrated was the custom one that was built for Cycle News. It’s built in PHP, using the CakePHP framework, and while it’s not perfect by any means, it’s easily expandable, can be made to fit into any situation, and is just all around pleasant to work with.

However - that functionality and expandability only came after many, many hours of work. Cycle News was a big project (you can see it here), and it was definitely OK that we spent the extra time to get it just right. But we can’t, with a good conscience, spend that large amount of resources on every site we build, which is of course why we use prepackaged CMS’s. But, what I’m hoping to discover in this new experiment of mine, is a middle ground.

After cutting the design and getting the front end stuff working on Cycle News, the next most time consuming part was writing the custom CMS backend. So what we need then is something that will cut down on the time needed to write the backend, but still allow complete flexibility in the different features of the site, without having to deal with integrating one crappy product into another.

Django (http://www.djangoproject.com), the Python-based framework that was originally created for news sites, is what I hope to be that solution. Django provides an awesome backend out of the box with minimal configuration. It is of course possible to customize the Django backend to your heart’s content, but the default look and feel is EXTREMELY usable without any customization at all.

What I’m hoping is that using Django as the backend to our smaller sites (and who knows...maybe some of our bigger ones later on as well) will allow for the fast turnaround time that a prepackaged CMS offers in addition to the customization that a completely custom CMS gives us developers. Will it work as I hope? I have no idea. What do the readers think? Good idea or bad? We’ll see, but stay tuned to the Watercooler to see how it all pans out.