At the moment we are running few smaller PHP sites (small company, private, non-profit org, friends...) and would like to migrate them to Python in order to be able to tweak them more easily and/or extend their functionality due to being familiar with Python although without real experience using some of the Python frameworks.
In order not to write everything from the scratch, we'd need decent CMS, blog and some e-commerce module.
We did some research, installed and tried few apps in Django world and so far have arrived to the two possibilities:
Both combinations are nice, although not perfect...At the moment there is problem integrating released versions of django-cms & zinnia due to their usage of non-compatible versions of django-mptt or e.g. Mezzanine is missing some features like linkback support in blog etc.
While playing with the above two sets of apps, we heard about Web2py and must say that we like lot of things there...
We are aware it's younger project with smaller community, less apps etc., but wonder if there is some set of web2py applications which can compare with the two above-mentioned Django sets so that we can choose to start with Web2py, learn it and in that process replace PHP sites with it?
So, we would like to have some capable CMS+blog with the following features:
As far as e-commerce is concerned, besides easy integration with CMS+blog apps we do not need anything spectacular - our 'company' is selling 'services', so no need for thousands of products (only 10s of them), no complicated shipping options so something like:
would be everything what we would need.
Considering the features we would like to have, our (non)experience working with any framework, which one - Django or Web2py - you consider is more suitable in terms of ease of learning, ease of use, application support etc. ?
I've sent two posts to web2py list and (maybe) because my query was not specific-enough (or some other reason) I did not receive any reply there and I saw there are some apps like KPAX CMS which looks old/non-maintained. Otoh, there is Powerpack which incorporates Instant Press but I'm not sure about availability of e-commerce component. Finally, I've found out about plugin_wiki which seems to be new/young app, but, considering we found* out about possibilities in Django-world, we would like to learn about the situation on the Web2py scene in order to be able to evaluate both options better.
p.s. it would be nice if Appliances list would be organized a bit better so that it's easy to find out what is maintained, where is project page etc.
Django is perfect for e-commerce startups, as it's a good fit for small websites and can scale perfectly with business growth. You can rely on Django to handle hundreds/thousands of visitors at a time. It's built with independent components you can unplug or replace depending on your needs at any specific time.
It's better and in many cases it's probably the best. Django is a fantastic framework with thousands of plugins aka apps and has a huge developer community. Whenever you find a problem, you'll get a solution from SO, blogs and other resources.
Django is a web framework which can sometimes be used to make a CMS, but it is not, by itself, a full CMS.
Web2py is a potential framework when compared to Django and Flask in terms of speed and simplicity of the development. As Web2py uses python-based template language, this allows python developers to start writing code immediately after understanding the basics of writing template as views.
I've had a lot of success with Django-CMS. It's very, very easy to write custom content-type plugins, extend menu nodes with custom nav elements, such as a list of product categories, etc. It's dead-simple to hook custom application code to any page in the navigation hierarchy.
As you mentioned in your question, Zinnia also plugs into Django-CMS for a nice blogging solution that is also extensible. Adding a cart app, whether it's from the DIVIO team or not should be an easy task.
Django, DjangoCMS and Python in general, have very low learning curves in my opinion. In 14 years of development, Django is the only web framework that hasn't gotten in my way, and Python is an absolute pleasure to work with on a daily basis.
I think you'll find that the Django ecosystem is much more holistic than any of the other Python frameworks, it's also very, very well documented and there are literally hundreds of 3rd party apps. Plus, Django admin can potentially save you many weeks of dev time, and you can override, skin and extend it to do just about anything.
My $0.02 :)
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