Why another CMS?

The Goal

We’re constantly looking for limitless experiences. When we are going through the selection of CMS platforms we find different and variety of products and solutions that each are based on different functionalities, depending on what they offer and designed for. And this creates huge limitations if you are looking to customize the CMS for your specific need. Starting from our use case (in a univeristy environment) below the list of some of the reasons why another CMS.

  1. Changing the structure of pages. In a CMS like Wordpress you cannot modify the structure of the page and you are limited to deal with its content only. To modify the structure you are forced to modify its template in use which requires PHP knowledge.

  2. Implementation of large and scalable portals/services. Wordpress does not scale, it is designed as a personal blog therefore it does not satisfy the requirements when it comes to large volumes of traffic.

  3. Graphics customization (templates and structure). All platforms require highly specialized development efforts within their environment. There are (expensive) plugins that damage the users’ impression of customizing graphics, but these only offer predefined assets of ordinary solutions. Even on Drupal and Joomla the designer cannot do any graphic customization without engaging with the development team.

  4. Reuse of images in different contexts. Drupal allows it only if combined with some plugins that modify the post structure and also the publication methods.

  5. Moving content from one context to another. In a standard CMS environment this requires access and alteration of the contents present on the database and data in general. In Drupal for example both the paths defined on the filesystem and the information within the database require changes. In UniCMS it is possible to do this simply by referencing the content to one or more webpaths.

  6. Content Inheritance. Drupal and other similar CMS cannot inherit the contents of a parent page.

  7. High availability. Drupal and many others does not have native support for HA.

What about other Django based CMSs?

They are brilliant but:

  • they still require development skills to build a professional CMS

  • some of them overkille/overwhelmed with numerous extensions and components that transforms the platform in a non-linear environment and it gest very messy

  • too much outsourced integration with templates, probably hindering the most important marketplace in the industry

This of course does not indicate that uniCMS is designed for dummy users, or that it won’t get oversized in time however, the plan is to place in its core all common and necessary module which will reduce the risk of it getting overwhelmed with external components such as extensions etc.

Most importantly uniCMS is Django CMS… its core strenght comes precisely from Django!