CMS Frameworks What To Use? Django vs. Drupal

May 20

An acquaintance and I were discussing what to do about moving from an older PHP based CMS, used in a somewhat complex University setting, that had grown unwieldy, to something newer like Drupal. Here are some thoughts.

I believe that if you are going to make such a major shift it is worth it to get out of any PHP framework. PHP while very popular and having many large sites is an inherently clumsy approach to programming, and therefore tends to introduce problems into most if not all the products derived from it.

Keep in mind that all of the below are Django projects therefore share a lot of common code and building blocks, making for a very rich ecco system. That is you can often take features from one and ad them to another.

There are a huge number of very large and high traffic sites implemented in Django

The main Django site is :http://www.djangoproject.com/

See this for some perspective:

http://birdhouse.org/blog/2009/11/11/drupal-or-django/

That being said there is no real reason to start off with "naked" Django. There are numerous CMS approaches all available as Open source, and by the way the Django/Python world is generally BSD licenced (one of the most liberal licences)

Projects worth a look at are (in no particular order):

Fairly basic and new but clean design:

http://mezzanine.jupo.org/

Django-CMS

https://www.django-cms.org/

Django Pyramid

Comparison: Django-Pyramid vs Rails

Site: http://docs.pylonsproject.org/docs/pyramid.htm

Pinax: A prefab set of Django components:

http://pinaxproject.com/

For an overwhelming overview check out this comparison site

https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison