2009-03-07

Django page CMS 0.2.4 is released

A lot of time has passed since the last time I blogged about my Django CMS

Django page CMS has gained users and contributors since this moment. I takes me more time to checking out the new issues, keep them as low as possible and have an up to date documentation. It begins to be difficult to handle everything myself with my new job at Opera software. Thanks for the contributors that help me in this task.

The code base is now quite stable. I try to keep it clean and simple. It's not always easy with all the feature proposition and code contribution. Here is a brief summary of what have been achieved since the version 0.2.1 up to lastest 0.2.4 release :

  • I have completly revamped the page admin interface. Now the tree is collapsed by default. When you expand a node, the children are loaded via an XMLHttpRequest. This method reduce the amount of SQL request needed by default. Before the tree was reladed each time you move a page in the tree. Now only the relevants parts are reloaded.s
  • The site framework is now optional and disabled by default. It's also implemented in a simpler way.
  • I added a basic way to integrate third party application into the page edition form.
  • I also try to make things a little faster by using cache on page content. It's quite easy to invalidate the content cache of a page after modification. For nested pages and everything related to URLs it's a little bit more complicated.
  • The different languages support is now stronger and tested. You can use languages code up to 5 letters and redirect client special languages to others like "fr-ch" to "fr" (Swiss french to simple french).
  • I try to add a test everytime it was relevant and if the bug/feature was suggest to regression.
  • Finaly, I learned how to do a proper python package and published it on PyPi. Install django page cms is as simple as : $ sudo pip install django-page-cms.

My goal is to offer a very simple, easy to start with Django CMS. I try to add the important features to reduce the need of forks. But I know how it's not possible to please everyone. (django-cms 2.0 is one of the fork)

For the near future I plan to break some minor stuff so if you don't want any trouble, I recommend to stick to the 0.2.4 version.

Thanks again a lot to the contributors and users. I hope you will continue to use this CMS and occasionaly help me.

Cheers, Batiste