I'd be extremely interested from a wholly self-interested point of view to know what you think of http://demo.django-cms.org/ (for an out-of-the-box demo of django CMS), and whether you'd find that as quick to get to grips with as WordPress).
I just spent 8 minutes, and I still haven't figured out how to edit the text of a blog article on the demo site, or create a new post with any body content. All I see is a form for editing article metadata and lead, no matter how I try to get at it.
1. Blog -> Article List -> (Title) doesn't do it.
2. Blog -> Edit this article doesn't do it.
3. Double clicking on article text only lets me edit single paragraphs at a time. It doesn't seem to let me add or re-order paragraphs either.
4. Blog -> Article List -> Add Article doesn't let me create a post with body content.
The Help section in the sidebar with mini video introductions explains that.
See step 6 (using the Content Wizard to create a new weblog article for example, including body content) or step 7 (which explains how to switch to structure mode, another way to add and/or rearrange body content).
Existing body content can be edited simply by double-clicking on it while in edit mode.
The question is whether this is just a case of understanding the basics of a different paradigm, or something that could be made more intuitive.
Thanks for the feedback, and thanks for taking the trouble to look at it.
I spent another 15 minutes with the structure editor, and I think I understand the content model now. During my first encounter it was very difficult for me to discover why when I edited an article, I only saw metadata + lead-in, but not content. I now understand that the content is a series of content blocks that I can edit and rearrange in the structure editor.
Looking at the "A Shifting Reef" demo article, it's still somewhat surprising to me that a document containing a lead-in, a paragraph, a blockquote, three more paragraphs, and an image can't be edited as a whole document. Instead, it appears to be treated as an array of [pagemeta], [text], [blockquote], [text], and [image], all of which must be edited separately.
My understanding is that if I wanted to move the image up two paragraphs, I'd have to:
1. Open the Structure Editor
2. Create a new, empty text block below the image. Save it.
3. Open the text block before the image, cut the last two paragraphs. Save it.
4. Open the bottom text block, paste the two paragraphs. Save it.
If I lose my clipboard between steps 3 and 4, I lose content. Similarly, if someone visits my site between steps 3 and 4, they see broken content. Django CMS has a strong enough reputation that I'm completely willing to believe that I'm being dense and missing something fundamental here. I'd really appreciate your insight as to what I'm doing wrong, and what the expected workflow is. Because right now, that all seems unreasonably convoluted and unsafe for rearranging an image or blockquote amongst text.
I guess this would be less of a problem if I could somehow see a stack of all the structured content editors for a given articles, and change them all at once before saving, but I can't seem to find anything like that, either.
That doesn't work; I can't seem to split the text block to put the image between two paragraphs. In the demo, on the "A Shifting Reef" article, how would you place the image between the paragraph starting "The facts relating" and "Taking into consideration"? They're both part of a single Generic Text block, so my only option in Structure Mode appears to be putting the image above the entire 3-paragraph text block of below it.
If I wanted move an image around inside text content, should I be using the CMS Plugins -> Bootstrap 3 -> Image widget inside the text content editor, instead of doing it in the structure editor? Or should I use CMS Plugins -> Filer -> Image? Why are there two ways to add images to my site?
I'm not being willfully obtuse here; I'm genuinely failing to accomplish common, content-centric editing tasks. The structured content model of Django CMS looks really interesting and powerful, but its usability and discoverability seems pretty difficult for me. I'd highly recommend running some usability tests and observing real people interacting with Django CMS and competing platforms to see where people get stuck and what wrong turns they take. Jakob Nielsen has a good article on usability testing at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-101-introduction-....
It is totally unusable for anybody who ever has seen the easy usability of WordPress. Please do yourself a favor and build a few sites in WP to understand how WP works and why it is so successful.
I am writing this not to attack you, it is a real life experience I had with many clients - they just look at me when I ask them to try Django CMS, asking "really???".
I would like to have them to use anything that has django under the hood, but they always take the WP road when given demo setups and some time to experiment.
Wagtail changed that, people seem to understand the Wagtail interface much better, but it is seriously lacking basic features. You at least understood that people want categories - call it taxonomies and allow multiple ways to use and edit them. Ah, just use WP for a few ways to understand how powerful that concept is.
Or if you would like to compare it with actually working on the site as a developer rather than just as a content editor, then it would be https://www.django-cms.org/en/blog/2016/02/16/build-a-websit....
What further improvements would take it right up to, or even past, WordPress levels of ease-of-use, in your opinion?