I work for large web consultancy firm in Sweden. We've been offering Wordpress and Drupal as a 'lightweight' alternatives to commercial CMSes for these past three years. Even though WP and Drupal are great open source products they've been causing us pain and we've been looking for alternatives. First, we would prefer not to work in Php. It's a broken language and it won't be fixed anytime soon. Ruby and Python are simply better choices. WP has a top notch admin interface but its data model is not suited to anything other than a simple blog. Custom post types aren't that fun when you want to do custom queries against the wp_postmeta table. Drupals major problem is its configuration management. You build a Drupal site by clicking around in an admin interface and all those settings have to be transfered to prod somehow. In theory, the Drupal module Features should solve that problem (it serializes the config state to code) but even though we use it (we have to - no large Drupal project can do without it), it gives us pain every day. Also, Drupal feels bloated and old, but that is my subjective opinion.
I've been evaluating Ruby / Python CMS alternatives for the past few years, and Mezzanine is the first non-php CMS that I've encountered that has the polish that is needed if you want to appeal to all those Php (or corporate) devs and their pointy-haired bosses. Its documentation and code is top notch. It has a small friendly community where Stephen McDonald (Mezz founder) is very active. We're doing a small (< 3 months project) with Mezzanine to kick the tires and if it works out we'll be able to recommend it to our
clients. I've been working with Mezzanine for about a month now, I feel very productive with it. Its a great feeling to look at the framework source code and very quickly understand what it is doing because it is so simple. South is a beautiful technology, it allows us to evolve our custom page types fast in a controlled manner.
Just thought I would mention that "South" (http://south.aeracode.org/) is a database schema migration plugin for Django. It generates files containing the operations required to 'migrate' (alter and update) your schema and it's data from one version to another. These files sit nicely in the repository and can be run all at once or one at a time to bring a database up to snuff.
I've found it's really excellent once my db schema has settled into something relatively stable when future changes become more disruptive.
At the moment I've to use PHP CMS-es nto being able to find something which is easy enough for Python noob to start with.
When I was looking last time in Django world, there was FeinCMS (not quite end-user app) and Django-CMS having some deps (hell) problems and Mezzanine was quite young at that time.
Tried my luck with web2py, but there one is, seemingly, supposed to write everything from the scratch which is too time-consuming for me 'cause there are no actively developed CMS-es/blog engines with active community of users.
Recently, we took another look at CMS/blog/ecommerce apps in Django world...Mezzanine is the clear winner - actively developed, nice community build around it which helps/improve applications, great documentation, very responsive main developer, decent CMS/blog/ecommerce nicely integrated....shorty, everything what we could hope to find in order to move from PHP for all our web needs, but not requiring huge amount of time to startup.
Congrats for beautiful application given for free to end-users & developers...and I hope being able to contribute back somehow pretty soon. ;)
If you look at the Authorize.net one for example, most of the lines of code are setting up the POST data. The actual posting is only about 6 lines or so.
I've been evaluating Ruby / Python CMS alternatives for the past few years, and Mezzanine is the first non-php CMS that I've encountered that has the polish that is needed if you want to appeal to all those Php (or corporate) devs and their pointy-haired bosses. Its documentation and code is top notch. It has a small friendly community where Stephen McDonald (Mezz founder) is very active. We're doing a small (< 3 months project) with Mezzanine to kick the tires and if it works out we'll be able to recommend it to our clients. I've been working with Mezzanine for about a month now, I feel very productive with it. Its a great feeling to look at the framework source code and very quickly understand what it is doing because it is so simple. South is a beautiful technology, it allows us to evolve our custom page types fast in a controlled manner.
Thank you Mezzanine contributors!