django-cms versus textpattern

Question

I am at present building a medium-sized educational website containing text, academic articles, blog, audio book excerpts, mathematical demos, etc., using custom CSS styles. I am leaning toward two ready-made solutions:

• django-cms; and
• textpattern.

I have ruled out WordPress because customization is not so easy. Joomla is overkill for this website and the table based design it uses is against my philosophy.

Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.

What are the pros and cons between django-cms and textpattern based on prior experience of the people on this list?

Many thanks.

Answer 1

For a comparison of CMSes the best site I have found so far is:

http://cmsmatrix.org/matrix

Over 1200 CMSes are listed and you can compare CMSes by clicking on the checkboxes provided this helped me make my decision and ended up turning back to one of the popular CMSes namely WordPress.

Answer 2

Because I have a number of years of experience in django, django-cms seems to be the natural way to go, but textpattern has more out-of-the-box features and is well supported.

django-cms also has a lot of features from plugins and are well supported too.

django-cms is a fine software which even has it's own hosting site. If as you seem to suggest, the only reason you are looking at textpattern is because it has many out-of-the-box features, then you should really go the natural way with django-cms.

Answer 3

I'm a fan of Textpattern and have been using it for years now. It's benefits are its simplicity and light-weight making it perform well. However, these might be an issue for you if you are wanting to build different content types. Textpattern's interface treats all article content as the same (unless you start install a load of plugins to tweak this). This is fine if your site is primarily for articles, but from what you've said in your question I suspect not.

It is really simple to download and install; so I'd recommend giving it a quick look to see what it can do for you.