The year in django CMS

Dec. 15, 2014

With 2014 drawing to a close, here's a roundup of what's happened over the last twelve months.

Events

django CMS has been to conferences around the world. At Django Weekend Cardiff (itself a django CMS website), Django Village in Orvieto, DjangoCon Europe in the south of France and Pycon UK in Coventry there were django CMS talks and workshops.

django CMS was also at Django Under the Hood in Amsterdam, as a sponsor, making the project's contribution to the wider Django community still more tangible.

An even larger number of events around the world were sponsored by agencies for whom django CMS is a key tool, including Divio and Nephila, demonstrating the significance of django CMS in the Django application ecosystem.

Development

In April this year we released django CMS 3.0, the result of a huge collective effort. django CMS 3 introduced new editing modes and put more power in the hands of content editors without adding to their complexity burden.

We're now on django CMS 3.0.7 and working simultaneously towards 3.0.8 (the next incremental release) and 3.1 (a planned release that is intended to consolidate the progress made so far and establish a solid base for future development in line with the long-term plans of the project).

In order to help support these long-term plans, and the growing community of developers, the project itself has been restructured. Adjango CMS technical board has been set up to oversee work on the project, and certain aspects of the development process have been formalised. We also now have an official Code of Conduct for the project and have agreed on some policies and workflows for managing development.

All this is intended to make contributing to the project easier, management of it more efficient and progress smoother and more transparent. It's already bearing fruit - the last few months of 2014 have seen an increase in development activity: more code commits, more engagement from django CMS users and developers and more people becoming involved for the first time.

Welcome Wagtail

django CMS is the most significant of numerous Django-based content management systems, but it's not the only one. The most impressive new contender this year is Wagtail, a fully-featured and polished open-source system.

Though Wagtail takes a very different approach from django CMS, its success since its launch in February is proof that the world of Django content management systems is healthy and full of ideas.

Simpler routes to django CMS deployment

... and speaking of ideas, like many Django projects, django CMS has long aspired to the ease-of-getting-started that applications such as WordPress enjoy, and we've made some significant steps in this area.

Nephila's django CMS installer has rapidly become the favoured way to install and configure a new django CMS project rapidly and with a minimum of fuss.

This year also saw the public launch of Aldryn, a cloud-based service for django CMS hosting that lowers the barriers to django CMS deployment further still.

Thank you!

Huge thanks to everyone who has been part of django CMS this year - if you've committed code, written documentation, helped out others on our email lists or IRC channels or reported a bug, you've helped move the project forward.

We look forward to more great work in 2015.