Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hi Brandon, Keith, I think Keith is referring to the thread I started earlier about a service that would provide a very easy way to install Mezzanine. Like you Brandon, I'd love to be able to recommend a Django-based alternative to WordPress. It seems that there isn't a solution like this yet. There is a real question in my mind about whether non-developers can really produce good quality web sites without learning quite a bit about coding. All of the approaches I know have serious problems: 1) The WordPress approach: The biggest problem is security. WordPress themes and plugins are just PHP code. The system suffers terribly in terms of security because of that. A WordPress site inherits all of the security problems that PHP has: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Security_Cheat_Sheet In addition, WordPress adds it's own: * 'convenient' SQL APIs that makes SQL injection vulnerabilities extremely likely. * use of PHP as template language, which makes XSS very likely, * complete lack of proper structure in request handling, which makes access permission vulnerabilities very likely. * Ability to edit the PHP templates, which means that admin access to a WordPress site (e.g. through a guessed password) immediately elevates to a remote execution vulnerability - the most serious kind. I recently evaluated the practicality of using WordPress as a cheap replacement for our current church website. I found a professional looking plugin that would actually do our sermon MP3 page, and so analysed the code. Within an hour I had found dozens of XSS vulnerabilities, and a bug that allowed *any* user (completely unauthenticated) to delete any file on the server. In other words, in terms of structure, WordPress provides a free-for-all that guarantees a security mess. The situation is terrible, and we all know WordPress sites that have been hacked as a result. This is really not something you want non-technical people to be dealing with. And even if you don't get hacked, you are still end up with something that is a nightmare to maintain - all the different plugins and themes are just cobbled together, and once you start upgrading things, you can expect a mess. 2) Website builders e.g. http://www.wix.com/ http://www.weebly.com/ http://squarespace.com/ This is the other end of the spectrum. You get a fairly locked down system, in which you must choose a template, with some controls for customisation, and add your own pages. There might be an apps market if you want to add custom server-side logic, but that's probably your only option. There are lots of downsides: * Quite limited in what you can do * Often badly optimised for mobile * Once you have more than a few pages, managing them all and keeping them consistent gets hard * You are locked into their platform If their templates and functionality suit your needs, they are great, but you can hit a limit fairly quickly. 3) Designer oriented sites For example https://webflow.com/ These can help web designers build good looking sites. You get a good level of control over HTML/CSS, but when it comes to CMS features I think they are lacking, and custom server-side logic is again going to be a problem. The idea is that designers hand off their code to a developer at that point. And that is the point at where something like Mezzanine comes in, which aims at the people who have 1) found the above three solutions inadequate for their needs, and 2) are technical enough to handle the alternative, or are happy to pay someone else who does have those skills e.g. an agency that builds custom web sites for people. It also aims to be just Django, which gives you the flexibility of building a lot more than just a blog. But this flexibility means that it cannot be totally opinionated about what it does, and therefore cannot do everything for you. I don't know if some middle ground between the alternatives is even theoretically possible. It is precisely the flexibility of WordPress in terms of installing arbitrary code that gives it the power it needs, and makes it a nightmare. Complete flexibility also means it's going to be very hard to create responsive (mobile optimised) sites, and that is more and more of a minimum requirement today. I have been toying with the idea of a building a service that would help you get a Mezzanine instance up and running, and would manage it entirely for you, including providing a set of themes you can choose from. There are some challenges in doing that - the Mezzanine themes that are available basically assume that you are going to edit them with a text editor at some point, rather than be installable in a point-and-click way. My ideal implementation of this would allow users to cut themselves loose when they outgrow the system, and at that point have a Django app that would be implemented using best practices, would have instructions about how to
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hello, Then there are the folks who know programming, but don't know python or django or if they do, don't know the strange stuff that has to do with web development. Either that or they don't know any html above h1/h1. What I was thinking is getting a reseller account at A2 hosting or something like that and have a full mezzanine setup for each new person. Then offer an installer or something for new themes. This shouldn't be too difficult, just offer an upload screen where you can select your theme and once it is uploaded, you can activate it. (activating would basically just be changing the settings.py file.) That way people could use the current themes. Of coarse they would get FTP access, but the point is to limit FTP access, so you don't need to deal with anything but the front-end. Then for super-users there could be a page where you could enter python code and add it to something like short-codes. For example, I have on my website a short-code in wordPress to display my age. It changes every year so I don't need to update my age every year. So it looks like: Brandon Keith Biggs is a [age name=brandon] year old singer, programmer and avid book-lover. and it comes out as: Brandon Keith Biggs is a 23 year old singer, programmer and avid book-lover. In wordPress you make a function in functions.php and add it to the short-code list. I was thinking this could be nearly the same in mezzanine, but you could modify the functions.py file only if you are super-user. I, for example, would love a setup like that. I really don't mind what theme I have, but I would like to be able to place variables or references to HTML blocks different places. The reason why I am looking for a CMS other than WP is because I am trying to create a website that is a little more advanced than what I need for my personal website. I would like to make my personal website in mezzanine though. I would like also to tell people to get a mezzanine hosted website as then I can help them if they need. Also, making plugins in django is way easier than in PHP... Having an already setup mezzanine site on a person's new hosting account would make it so they just need to worry about learning how the CMS works and possibly django. What would be the downside to something like this? I have never worked for anyone who really tried to muck around with anything they weren't supposed to and generally if you mess up your website it is kind of your fault. There is always the back-up... Or you can pay me to fix it. I am not sure about mezzanine, but in wordPress there is a way to separate users out to have different permissions. This group of users can add blog posts and that is it. These users can add pages under this category and that is it, these users can make products, add pages and blog posts, These users can add themes, plugins, pages, products and blog posts, these users can add or remove users below them, add themes, plugins... So perhaps there could be superadmin and that has access to the script file, changing themes and whatnot, then normaladmin could add or remove accounts, add pages and menus and basically everything not code or theme related. So it is, I believe, something like https://webflow.com/ just in mezzanine and the ability to learn django if you wish. Is there a problem with something like this? thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 5/1/2015 2:55 PM, Luke Plant wrote: Hi Brandon, Keith, I think Keith is referring to the thread I started earlier about a service that would provide a very easy way to install Mezzanine. Like you Brandon, I'd love to be able to recommend a Django-based alternative to WordPress. It seems that there isn't a solution like this yet. There is a real question in my mind about whether non-developers can really produce good quality web sites without learning quite a bit about coding. All of the approaches I know have serious problems: 1) The WordPress approach: The biggest problem is security. WordPress themes and plugins are just PHP code. The system suffers terribly in terms of security because of that. A WordPress site inherits all of the security problems that PHP has: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/PHP_Security_Cheat_Sheet In addition, WordPress adds it's own: * 'convenient' SQL APIs that makes SQL injection vulnerabilities extremely likely. * use of PHP as template language, which makes XSS very likely, * complete lack of proper structure in request handling, which makes access permission vulnerabilities very likely. * Ability to edit the PHP templates, which means that admin access to a WordPress site (e.g. through a guessed password) immediately elevates to a remote execution vulnerability - the most serious kind. I recently evaluated the practicality of using WordPress as a cheap replacement for our current church website. I found a professional looking plugin that
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hi Brandon Helping Mezzanine become novice friendly would be great I think. There are 3 articles written by Ross Laird that I have consistently found really useful... 1. http://www.rosslaird.com/blog/first-steps-with-mezzanine/ 2. http://www.rosslaird.com/blog/building-a-project-with-mezzanine/ 3. http://www.rosslaird.com/blog/customizing-mezzanine/ In terms of why Mezzanine is designed the way it is, well that is a big question. I have listened to this video http://blog.jupo.org/2014/08/21/pycon-apac-keynote-mezzanine/ a few times where Stephen McDonald talks about Mezzanine. It could be useful to give you a background as to where Mezzanine came from. I have heard that Vimeo may not be super accessible. Let me know if you have problems accessing the video... Take Care Graham On 30/04/15 06:52, Brandon Keith Biggs wrote: Hello, I have been looking around the web, comparing different python CMSes with Mezzanine and I keep coming back here. I am wondering why mezzanine does not implement functionality for non developers to use it out of the box? So for example, I have my website on wordPress and would like to migrate it to mezzanine. I know python, but not django. In order for me to move my site to mezzanine and make it look like I want, I need to both modify the CSS file, the template files, learn django so I can display some variables that I have on my front-page and figure out how to deploy mezzanine on a server. After I get my website up and running I want to learn django and start building apps. Granted, mezzanine has a much easier entry than any other python CMS I found, but I think it could and should be a little easier. After all, there is a huge audience of people who know basic python and would really like to use a python CMS, but don't want to learn django or a complex templating language to create a good looking website. For example, why does it take 5 commands to run? (granted 5 is really good as most other places take 10+), but mezzanine-project myproject could totally make the db, setup the user and ask if you would like to run the server. (possibly a -s or -b could setup the server for server-side development and -b could set the folder like it is now). I have not yet deployed it on a server yet, so can't say how difficult it is, but it would be really awesome if mezzanine either did what wordPress.com does or give a really easy (no more than 10 step) tutorial on how to install mezzanine on something like Python Anywhere. Also, why does mezzanine not have a content folder with subfolders of plugins, themes, apps and the default templates? I think it would be super easy to make and would promote well-organized site structure. I know that mezzanine is built for developers, but so is python. I think that mezzanine could totally remain super developer friendly while also being non programmer and basic python programmer friendly. These are just a few thoughts from someone who is just coming into mezzanine never having developed for the web in python before. (Other than brython :)). I really would like to tell people to use mezzanine rather than wordPress because learning how to script in python is just so much easier than learning how to script in PHP, but currently it is too complex. I am learning django and hopefully I can either make a separate CMS based off mezzanine or help mezzanine to become novice friendly. Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/22/2015 4:46 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
You need to know django well in order to understand mezzanine development. On Wednesday, April 29, 2015 at 12:07:42 AM UTC+6, Brandon Keith Biggs wrote: Hello, I am reading the content architecture page and I am wondering where the .py files are supposed to be saved and how they interact with the HTML pages? I generally like to type out the examples given and then break them or change them. I have no django experience, so should I go through their tutorial before going into mezzanine, or can I start with mezzanine then go into django if I wish? Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/28/2015 7:28 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs wrote: Hello, I think I figured out how to use the editor, you need to click on the html entry area in order to create HTML, then it makes little fields that are what you wrote. Is there a place where I can edit how that add page looks like? I would like to add a heading at either the text that says: Content: or Rich Text Area Either that, or make it so when you press tab you are put into the text editor. Currently I have to press 3 really weird key commands to move from the title to the text field. It is really not user friendly for me. (I have to press capslock+space to exit the forms area, x to move to the menu checkbox, then shift tab to get into the richtext area.) Also, is there a key command to switch to the html editor within MCE? I am having a weird problem that the insert link button is grayed out, so in order to add a link I have to go into the source and add the link. Does anyone know what may cause this? Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/28/2015 5:31 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, I don't understand the first question. What was the input and what would you expect it to produce? The widget probably needs to be updated to django.forms.Textarea I had been thinking of something else when I omitted the django. previously. On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs brandonk...@gmail.com javascript: wrote: Hello, 2 things: 1. setting the allowd markup to everything still produces something like h1Hello world/h1 and copying the line: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea gives the following error: ImproperlyConfigured at /admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Request Method: GET Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Django Version: 1.6.11 Exception Type: ImproperlyConfigured Exception Value: Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/22/2015 4:46 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front end technology you want. Right now Mezzanine ships with Twitter Bootstrap as a frontend framework and I think most people, myself included, are very happy with it. But really, Mezzanine doesn't force front end technology on you, it just default to Twitter Bootstrap and you can change that easily by changing your project's base.html Brython does look interesting though so I may have to take a look at it at some point! 5. Mezzanine does have some user account/profile support. Here are the docs, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/user-accounts.html. Mezzanine doesn't have any social login support but there are quite a few Django apps
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hi Brandon, I don't understand the first question. What was the input and what would you expect it to produce? The widget probably needs to be updated to django.forms.Textarea I had been thinking of something else when I omitted the django. previously. On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs brandonkeithbi...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, 2 things: 1. setting the allowd markup to everything still produces something like h1Hello world/h1 and copying the line: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea gives the following error: ImproperlyConfigured at /admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Request Method: GET Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Django Version: 1.6.11 Exception Type: ImproperlyConfigured Exception Value: Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/22/2015 4:46 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front end technology you want. Right now Mezzanine ships with Twitter Bootstrap as a frontend framework and I think most people, myself included, are very happy with it. But really, Mezzanine doesn't force front end technology on you, it just default to Twitter Bootstrap and you can change that easily by changing your project's base.html Brython does look interesting though so I may have to take a look at it at some point! 5. Mezzanine does have some user account/profile support. Here are the docs, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/user-accounts.html. Mezzanine doesn't have any social login support but there are quite a few Django apps that do that which you could use to add that functionality 6. I tend to use https://www.digitalocean.com/ (VPS) or https://www.webfaction.com/ (shared host). I've never used it on a cPanel host but you do need ssh access to a host to be able to deploy Mezzanine. 7. Mezzanine doesn't have plugins in the same sense as Wordpress. You can't install anything through Mezzanine's admin interface other than possibly adding some Javascript to the content of pages. Here is a list of modules that have been created for use with Mezzanine, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/overview.html#third-party-modules but most if not all of them probably require modifying at a minimum your projects settings.py file Here are a few more thoughts: Mezzanine is Django so anything you can do with Django you can do in Mezzanine. That means that when you look for modules you can cast a wider net than just looking for things that were specifically made for Mezzanine The following is my opinion and I'm sure my bias towards Mezzanine will show. Mezzanine and Wordpress have fundamentally different philosophies. Wordpress is more targeted at end users by making it easy to install plugins through the admin interface. I tend to think that with a Wordpress site you could get 80% to 90% of the functionality you want with plugins but that last 10% may be very difficult. Mezzanine on the other hand requires you to either have a developer or know how to code yourself. It doesn't try to be all things to all people but does provide a solid core feature set and makes it easy for a Django developer to add missing functionality. Hopefully that helps. Welcome to Mezzanine and please keep asking questions. Good luck! On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 6:10 AM, Brandon
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hello, I am reading the content architecture page and I am wondering where the .py files are supposed to be saved and how they interact with the HTML pages? I generally like to type out the examples given and then break them or change them. I have no django experience, so should I go through their tutorial before going into mezzanine, or can I start with mezzanine then go into django if I wish? Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/28/2015 7:28 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs wrote: Hello, I think I figured out how to use the editor, you need to click on the html entry area in order to create HTML, then it makes little fields that are what you wrote. Is there a place where I can edit how that add page looks like? I would like to add a heading at either the text that says: Content: or Rich Text Area Either that, or make it so when you press tab you are put into the text editor. Currently I have to press 3 really weird key commands to move from the title to the text field. It is really not user friendly for me. (I have to press capslock+space to exit the forms area, x to move to the menu checkbox, then shift tab to get into the richtext area.) Also, is there a key command to switch to the html editor within MCE? I am having a weird problem that the insert link button is grayed out, so in order to add a link I have to go into the source and add the link. Does anyone know what may cause this? Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/28/2015 5:31 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, I don't understand the first question. What was the input and what would you expect it to produce? The widget probably needs to be updated to django.forms.Textarea I had been thinking of something else when I omitted the django. previously. On Mon, Apr 27, 2015 at 7:12 PM, Brandon Keith Biggs brandonkeithbi...@gmail.com mailto:brandonkeithbi...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, 2 things: 1. setting the allowd markup to everything still produces something like h1Hello world/h1 and copying the line: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea gives the following error: ImproperlyConfigured at /admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Request Method: GET Request URL: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/pages/richtextpage/9/ Django Version: 1.6.11 Exception Type: ImproperlyConfigured Exception Value: Could not import the value of settings.RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS: forms.Textarea Thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/22/2015 4:46 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front end technology you want. Right now Mezzanine ships with Twitter Bootstrap as a frontend framework and I think most people, myself included, are very happy with it. But really, Mezzanine doesn't force front end technology on you, it just default to Twitter Bootstrap and you can change that easily by changing your project's base.html Brython does look interesting though so I may have to take a look at it at some point! 5. Mezzanine does have some user account/profile support. Here are the docs, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/user-accounts.html. Mezzanine doesn't have any social login support but there are quite a
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
I think Josh's suggestion should work. You could save yourself some headache by using the `choices` argument of CharField to limit the options to the tinymce or forms.Textarea options. -ken -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Mezzanine Users group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mezzanine-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hi Brandon, conceptually settings are intended to be configured for a project as a whole and aren't intended to be configured per user. That said something I think you could do, I've never done this, would be to create a user profile and have one of the fields be a CharField that stores the dotted path to a rich text widget. You could have it default to being blank, and then in your case change it to forms.Textarea Then you would set RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS to a custom widget which you would create. You custom widget would need some logic to check the current user's profile and basically return whatever widget their profile indicated if any, and otherwise return the Mezzanine default (or something like that). On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 11:26 AM, Brandon Keith Biggs brandonkeithbi...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, Is it possible to have user settings for each person? Because I could have a check for my user profile and say if user == me, RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea. I could also mod my account to look like I want it, but other users may wish to have their account look different. Are settings local to a user? If not, why? thanks, Brandon Keith Biggs http://www.brandonkeithbiggs.com/ On 4/22/2015 4:46 PM, Josh Cartmell wrote: Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front end technology you want. Right now Mezzanine ships with Twitter Bootstrap as a frontend framework and I think most people, myself included, are very happy with it. But really, Mezzanine doesn't force front end technology on you, it just default to Twitter Bootstrap and you can change that easily by changing your project's base.html Brython does look interesting though so I may have to take a look at it at some point! 5. Mezzanine does have some user account/profile support. Here are the docs, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/user-accounts.html. Mezzanine doesn't have any social login support but there are quite a few Django apps that do that which you could use to add that functionality 6. I tend to use https://www.digitalocean.com/ (VPS) or https://www.webfaction.com/ (shared host). I've never used it on a cPanel host but you do need ssh access to a host to be able to deploy Mezzanine. 7. Mezzanine doesn't have plugins in the same sense as Wordpress. You can't install anything through Mezzanine's admin interface other than possibly adding some Javascript to the content of pages. Here is a list of modules that have been created for use with Mezzanine, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/overview.html#third-party-modules but most if not all of them probably require modifying at a minimum your projects settings.py file Here are a few more thoughts: Mezzanine is Django so anything you can do with Django you can do in Mezzanine. That means that when you look for modules you can cast a wider net than just looking for things that were specifically made for Mezzanine The following is my opinion and I'm sure my bias towards Mezzanine will show. Mezzanine and Wordpress have fundamentally different philosophies. Wordpress is more targeted at end users by making it easy to install plugins through the admin interface. I tend to think that with a Wordpress site you could get 80% to 90% of the functionality you want with plugins but that last 10% may be very difficult. Mezzanine on the other hand requires you to either have a developer or know how to code yourself. It doesn't try to be all things to all people but does provide a solid core
Re: [mezzanine-users] Some newbie questions for someone moving from WP to mezzanine
Hi Brandon, hopefully the following are helpful answers! 1. Title + the publishing controls are present across all things that inherit from the Displayable class where as the type of content on those various models will vary from class to class. Blog Posts have categories and content, Rich Text Pages just have content, Links have no content, etc... All the admin classes of those models inherit from Displayable so they end up all having those things grouped. Besides the technical reasons I think the consistency is useful and I find it nice to always be able to have the publishing controls right there. 2. The editor is a WYSIWYG, particularly one called TinyMCE. Here's what they have to say about accessibility, http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/TinyMCE3x:Accessibility, but maybe some or all of that isn't working? You can change what is used though, for example in your project's settings.py file you could put: RICHTEXT_WIDGET_CLASS = forms.Textarea Doing that should get rid of the WYSIWYG and those types of fields should just show up as normal HMTL textareas. That would affect any admin user, not just yourself. 3. There isn't anything like that built in, there might be other projects that do things like that for Django that you could integrate with Mezzanine. 4. I don't think we have considered Brython but it should be easy to integrate any front end technology you want. Right now Mezzanine ships with Twitter Bootstrap as a frontend framework and I think most people, myself included, are very happy with it. But really, Mezzanine doesn't force front end technology on you, it just default to Twitter Bootstrap and you can change that easily by changing your project's base.html Brython does look interesting though so I may have to take a look at it at some point! 5. Mezzanine does have some user account/profile support. Here are the docs, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/user-accounts.html. Mezzanine doesn't have any social login support but there are quite a few Django apps that do that which you could use to add that functionality 6. I tend to use https://www.digitalocean.com/ (VPS) or https://www.webfaction.com/ (shared host). I've never used it on a cPanel host but you do need ssh access to a host to be able to deploy Mezzanine. 7. Mezzanine doesn't have plugins in the same sense as Wordpress. You can't install anything through Mezzanine's admin interface other than possibly adding some Javascript to the content of pages. Here is a list of modules that have been created for use with Mezzanine, http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/overview.html#third-party-modules but most if not all of them probably require modifying at a minimum your projects settings.py file Here are a few more thoughts: Mezzanine is Django so anything you can do with Django you can do in Mezzanine. That means that when you look for modules you can cast a wider net than just looking for things that were specifically made for Mezzanine The following is my opinion and I'm sure my bias towards Mezzanine will show. Mezzanine and Wordpress have fundamentally different philosophies. Wordpress is more targeted at end users by making it easy to install plugins through the admin interface. I tend to think that with a Wordpress site you could get 80% to 90% of the functionality you want with plugins but that last 10% may be very difficult. Mezzanine on the other hand requires you to either have a developer or know how to code yourself. It doesn't try to be all things to all people but does provide a solid core feature set and makes it easy for a Django developer to add missing functionality. Hopefully that helps. Welcome to Mezzanine and please keep asking questions. Good luck! On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 6:10 AM, Brandon Keith Biggs brandonkeithbi...@gmail.com wrote: Hello, After spending 8 months with wordPress, I am throwing my hands up and moving back to my home language python. I saw mezzanine was probably the cms that would give me the least problems, but I have some questions: 1. The edit page screen is really messy and difficult to navigate. I am using a screen reader, so that may be part of it, but why is the publish date stuff right under the title? why is not content right under title? I would like to enter the title, hit tab and enter the page content. Also, why is the body text editor not a multi edit field? The weird thing is that it now is almost unusable... I can't use navigation commands to get into it or out of it, it says paragraph editable while arrowing through each line and there is no advantage anywhere for having this. Perhaps it is a wysiwyg editor and that is why I don't see anything good about it. If so, how can I disable the wysiwyg editor for my account? 2. Not being able to write html from within the editor is horrible, I need to fix it. I spent all last night
