I've just spent months research different CMS alternatives and I've found vanilla Django to be far more pleasurable to work with than any of the add ons. Most of my clients can't be trusted to pick their own URL structures or deal with unnecessary buttons in the back end. Django gives me full control :)

This is one of the other reasons for hand-rolling our CMS - we got to control url structure, page layout, lock down WYSIWYG editing to just the required features (no, you can't have green text!) and countless other things.

The job of a client-facing CMS is NOT to be a flexible general purpose web editor - it's to allow the client to edit their content and enforcing enough constraints that it's hard for them to ruin their nice shiny new web site. :) (if any of my clients are reading - I know you would never do such a thing)

Glad to see I'm on the right track :) I spent too long figuring out that WordPress and Drupal are terrible, and then it took a while for me to find Django. Very little written out there about using Django to build brochureware.

If you don't mind me asking, could you write up a list of all the django apps and python packages that help the most in your projects? I'm new to the ecosystem and picking it up as fast as I can but there's only so many hours in the day. Obviously, I've chosen to do this live in the middle of a contract so it's sorta eating me alive.

Also, I'll take this chance make my short pitch: If you're ever looking for some extra hands on a project, I'm currently looking for freelance work. I do full stack. New to django, but very experienced with MVC frameworks and I'm quite excellent with frontend javascript. I can even hold my own when it comes to design and selecting stock photos :) [email protected]

The clunkiness you describe may be because the CMS includes djangocms-admin-styles, which provides a beautiful style- (and behaviour) "sheet" over Django's Admin. Not only does it make admin look nicer, but it also adds touch-capabilities which doesn't really exist in pure Django.