General thoughts on CMS and PyLucid

[aptiko]

Hi,

I want to have an idea of where PyLucid development is heading towards, and where I'd like a CMS to head towards. It's probably quite intrusive for a first post; apologies, and anyway I hope it will be contributory.

The reason I'm interested in PyLucid is that it is written in Django.

I've been administrating and using Plone for a year now. I think it sucks greatly, but the other free CMS's I've seen suck even more. What I'd like to see would be a CMS that offers the features of Plone (I mention below which particular features are of interest to me), but that is easy to understand, administrate, and develop. And be a bit lighter, of course.

One of the features Plone has and I've not seen anywhere else is that its data model (from the end-user point of view) consists of objects placed in folders, much like a directory tree. Most other CMS's don't have folders and objects, they have pages, and you can attach files in pages. In Plone you don't attach anything to a page; instead, you put a file/image/whatever in a folder. You can, of course, put folders in folders. The advantage of doing it this way is that when you create a hierarchy, you can have an object inherit properties from its container. So, you make a folder, and define a different layout, and different owner. The owner has full permissions in that folder (recursively), and the folder will have a different layout (recursively), except if at some subfolder the properties are redefined, and so on.

Plone doesn't really do all that. Permissions work, yes. I'm not so sure about layout. I think that the ability to redefine portlet layout from a folder downwards was added in the latest version. I don't know if arbitrarily deep folders can use alternative skins yet, but what matters is that the data model allows such features to be added.

PyLucid, as you know, doesn't do this. Essentially it only consists of flat pages, it doesn't have a hierarchy. That you can define a parent in each page, so that it properly shows in the menu and in the URL, is more like an added feature than a deeply ingrained property of the system, as it is in Plone. And, as a result, it has limited use.

I think I need this model (but I'm open to discussion). Other features that are important to me are:

Pluggable user authentication and management. (I think PyLucid should use Django's, and if that is not enough, Django's should be fixed and extended - no work should be done at the PyLucid level.)

Multilinguality (Plone is quite good at that, though there is room for improvement.)

Well-documented APIs. One of the things that makes Django great is that its developers are paranoid about that. PyLucid, or any other extensible system built on top of Django, should be the same.

I think that the rest can be plugged-in if you have those. So, would you consider, for PyLucid, the data being stored as a tree of objects? If not, why? Isn't it cleaner? How else can you have inheritable properties such as permissions and layout?

Thanks for the attention!
_________________
Antonis Christofides

[jens]