Mezzanine 0.2.3

A content management platform built using the Django framework.

Mezzanine is a content management platform built using the Django framework. It is BSD licensed and designed to provide both a consistant interface for managing content, and a simple architecture that makes diving in and hacking on the code as easy as possible.

Its goal is to resemble something like Wordpress, with an intuitive interface for managing pages and blog posts. Mezzanine takes a different approach from other Django applications in this space like Pinax or Mingus that glue together a lot of reusable apps, instead opting to provide most of its functionality included with the project by default.

Features

On top of all the usual features provided by Django such as MVC architecture, ORM, templating, caching and the automatic admin interface, Mezzanine provides the following features.

• Hierarchical page navigation

• Save as draft and preview on site

• Scheduled publishing

• Drag-n-drop page ordering

• WYSIWYG editing

• API for custom content types

• SEO friendly URLs and meta data

• Mobile device detection and templates

• Blogging engine

• Tagging

• Built-in threaded comments, or:

• Disqus integration

• Gravatar integration

• Google Analytics integration

• Twitter feed integration

• bit.ly integration

• Sharing via Facebook or Twitter

• Custom templates per page or blog post

• Built-in test suite

The Mezzanine admin dashboard:

Dependencies

Apart from Django itself, Mezzanine has no explicit dependencies but is designed to be used most effectively in conjunction with the following libraries.

• setuptools

• Python Imaging Library (PIL)

• django-grappelli <= 2.0

• django-filebrowser <= 3.0

Installation

Assuming you have setuptools installed, the easiest method is to install directly from pypi by running the following command, which will also attempt to install the dependencies mentioned above:

$ easy_install -U mezzanine

Otherwise you can download Mezzanine and install it directly from source:

$ python setup.py install

Once installed, the command mezzanine-project should be available which can be used for creating a new Mezzaine project in a similar fashion to django-admin.py:

$ mezzanine-project project_name

You can then run your project with the usual Django steps:

$ cd project_name
$ ./manage.py syncdb
$ ./manage.py runserver

Contributing

Mezzanine is an open source project that is managed using both Git and Mercurial version control systems. These repositories are hosted on both Github and Bitbucket respectively, so contributing is as easy as forking the project on either of these sites and committing back your enhancements.

Sites Using Mezzanine

• Citrus Agency

Quotes

• “Who came up with the name Mezzanine? I love it, like a platform between the client’s ideas and their published website. Very classy!” - swhite