Hi Djangonauts,
I'm happy to announce the release of Mezzanine 1.0. Mezzanine is simple yet powerful BSD licensed CMS for building Django powered sites.
Development of Mezzanine and its sister project Cartridge (ecommerce for Mezzanine) began over two years ago, born from frustrations with the only options available at the time which were django-page-cms and Satchmo, and from a decade's experience in building proprietary CMSes and ecommerce solutions, prior to working with Django. Since then it has grown from real world requirements at a fast paced web development agency in Australia, and has received contributions from many dozens of developers on GitHub and Bitbucket, with a wider community of hundreds on the mailing list. Mezzanine and Cartridge have been used to power a long list of production sites, from personal blogs and agency sites, to some of the highest traffic content sites and ecommerce stores for some of the largest brands in Australia.
Here's an overview of Mezzanine's features:
- Hierarchical navigation tree, with page nodes extendable by Mezzanine's content type system. Content types are simply subclases of Mezzanine's Page model - subclass away and your new type is available.
- Inline front-end site editing that can be applied to any models: Mezzanine's, third party apps, or your own.
- Blogging app (regular Django app).
- Gallery app (a Mezzanine content type).
- Mobile device handling. Build separate mobile versions of templates where required to run a mobile version of the site - no separate URLs or views required.
- Form builder app (a Mezzanine content type). Admin users create their own forms, and view form submissions via the admin, or export them via CSV.
- Mezzanine projects are standard Django projects - admin, urlpatterns, views, models. Third party Django apps plug straight in without special handling.
- Built-in search engine.
- South migrations.
- Admin editable settings.
- Full test suite, continuously integrated (with Travis CI) including automated pep8/pyflakes integration. The code base is painstakingly clean.
- Fully documented, available on the Mezzanine project site as well as on Read The Docs.
- Translated into around a dozen languages, managed via Transifex.
- Grappelli/Filebrowser based admin. Third party Django admin classes plug straight in.
- Full featured ecommerce via Cartridge - a separate ecommerce app built for Mezzanine.
- All functionality comes with default templates to get you started, integrated with Bootstrap 2.0.
- Integrated with Django's sites app.
- A set of generic foreignkey types and models: tagging, threaded comments and ratings. All denormalised with counts, averages, etc.
To be honest, you could almost implement everything Mezzanine does by combining dozens of different open source Django apps that are out there. What you get from Mezzanine though, is everything integrated seamlessly out of the box, leaving you free to focus on building your site.
In conjunction with the Mezzanine 1.0 release, I've also released Cartridge 0.4. As I mentioned, Cartridge provides a full ecommerce package for Mezzanine. While Mezzanine is more of a framework for building sites with any type of content you need to, Cartridge is much more opinionated in its function, namely how a store should be set up, and is more of a standard Django app that implements the most common features you'd find in an online store. Like Mezzanine, Cartridge has been under development for a couple of years now. Since I haven't posted to django-users about either Mezzanine or Cartridge before, here's an overview of Cartridge's features as well:
- Hierarchical shop categories. These are just Mezzanine content types and hook into your site's navigation.
- Single interface for setting up a product, with 0 to N variations.
- Arbitrary product options (colours, sizes, etc).
- Hooks for shipping calculations and payment gateway.
- Sale pricing.
- Promotional discount codes.
- PDF invoice generation (for packing slips).
- Stock control.
- Dynamic categories (by price range, colour, etc).
- Registered or anonymous checkout.
- Configurable nunber of checkout steps.
So if you have a CMS or ecommerce Django project coming up, please check out Mezzanine and Cartridge. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know via the mailing list. Myself and other members of the community are quick to reply on there, and always open to suggestions and feedback.
Mezzanine project homepage:
http://mezzanine.jupo.org (includes a gallery of sites powered by Mezzanine, as well as a live Mezzanine/Cartridge demo. User: demo / pass: demo)