Ella project - Django powered CMS

Intro

Ella is an opensource CMS based on the framework Django. It originated in CentrumHoldings as CMS for their lifestyle magazines (mainly Žena.cz) with an ambition to become the only CMS powering all CentrumHoldings content websites from lifestyle magazines with medium traffic to news sites with millions of pageviews per day.

Technical

The system tries to utilize as much of django's features as possible, relying on it for DB access, templates and even it's automatic admin interface. The core of the system is separate from the data models representing the individual content objects (such as articles) which forced us to treat every content object the same, without relying on it's type. This resulted in a system that is easily extendable (adding a new content type consists of defining the db model and templates if needed) and plays well with 3rd party applications - almost any django application can be used from within ella with little or no changes and a few lides of binding code.

Features

The system currently consists of:

core application handling URLs, publication logic and provides all the tools for building content sites:

• URL patterns and according views defining templates
• mechanism for other application to inject themselves in the URL resolution
• box templatetag that can display object of any type via a common interface
• mechanism for publishing objects (defining URLs, listing objects in categories according to date and priorities)
• various caching tools

several content providing apps:

• photos app with automatic format generation
• articles
• galleries containing arbitrary number of objects of any type
• polls application that provides polls, quizes and contest models
• etc..

some tools to work with that content:

• comments (soon to be based on django.contrib.comments) with threading and basic moderation
• rating app
• tagging
• send link via email
• positions - a tool for editors to define what object should be visible in positions pre-defined by template designer

Status and future

Ella has been in production for over a year now and despite some child illnesses it has done a fine job. The codebase however shows every possible symptom of a young project - out of date docummentation, out of sync tests etc. In the future we plan on stabilizing the core of ella, including tests and docummentation (already working on that) and clean the other applications in order of priority and complexity. We would also very much like to extract some of the tools that we believe can be of some use outside of ella and replace some of the apps we use with the apps found on the Internet and help with their development instead of splitting the focus.

License

Ella is licensed under the BSD licence. It utilizes many conceps and examples from django itself, djangosnippets and several other open-source project. We would like to thank the community around Django for the huge amount of great quality code they share with other Djangonauts. We are proud to be part of that community and hope that somebody will find this project helpfull.

Download

The code is now availible on GitHub. No guaranties, but if you run into any trouble with ella, please let us know in the conference and we will try our best to help you.

Contact

• group: ella-project
• email: ella.project@gmail.com
• IRC: irc://#ella@irc.freenode.org

Authors

• Jakub Vysoký
• Honza Král
• Ondra Kohout
• Aleš Zoulek
• Vítek Pliska
• Vašek Bárta
• Jonáš Fiala
• Martin Holcman
• Honza Seifert