Why WordPress? You can also choose Django CMS

Start writiCreating your own website is not so difficult nowadays as it was twenty years ago. With the advent of the now popular content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress and Ghost, managing your websites is almost as easy as using Facebook. And that is reflected in the huge amount of websites that are online today, more than one billion ! As a result, there is more and more relevant content and ease of use and marketing integration is becoming increasingly important for these systems.

The possibilities now seem endless, but making a website is not always easy. You must also fine-tune your choice for the type of CMS that you are going to use. There is still a lot to gain until making websites is really easy, even with larger content management systems such as WordPress. To make things easier for you, in this article I will make a comparison between the popular and accessible WordPress CMS and the powerful and mature alternative Django CMS.

Why Django CMS?

As the founder of a company that builds customized applications, as a software engineer and web application builder, I have now worked with a large amount of content management systems. What is Django? It is the only system that can be compared with WordPress in future potential and technical quality.

Why WordPress?

That is an easy answer: it is the most popular content management system available. Nowadays, even 28 percent of websites run on WordPress, and 59 percent of websites with a CMS. Setting up a WordPress website is made very easy by the large amount of online services that are offered.

What is Django CMS?

Django CMS is just like WordPress, a content management system that is used by thousands or websites and organizations, including NASA and L'Oréal Men Expert. One of the most useful features is the ability to customize your content from the front of your website. This allows you to adjust your website by double clicking on an element. You do not need to open an admin page for this. Below you can see an example. In the substantive comparison below I will go deeper into the advantages.

Django CMS is open source , and built on Django and Python . Open source in this situation means that everyone on the internet is free to propose improvements. These proposals are assessed by a group of appointed managers and experts and possibly processed in the system.

Divio is the company that actively invests in Django CMS. Several people working on Django CMS are programmers who can work at the CMS from Divio, alongside the group of voluntary developers around the world.

What is WordPress?

This way you get the skills of a web editor

Learn all the tricks of the web editing profession in 7 days? Follow our short training!

Knowing more?

WordPress is the most popular content management system of the moment. For example, WordPress is used by, among others, The Next Web , Techcrunch and Frankwatching . One of the great advantages of WordPress comes from plugins , which can be fairly easy to install. There is a plugin for almost everything that you can think of. This way you can set up a WordPress website with great ease. The quality of plugins is sometimes debatable, although the really popular plugins are usually high quality.

Just like Django CMS, WordPress also has a team that actively invests in the system, in addition to a group of volunteers. In case of WordPress it is Automattic.

How WordPress and Django work

Django CMS and WordPress both work slightly differently, as you could read in the above description. The main difference can be seen in the infographic below.

Where WordPress is built directly on PHP, Django CMS is built on Django. The goal of Django is to provide a stable, safe and fast 'framework' for websites. Django CMS adds a content management layer here. WordPress is entirely built as CMS, this can be seen as a strong advantage. Django CMS benefits from large companies such as Instagram and Eventbrite, who actively invest time and expertise in Django. Due to the high demands of these companies, you benefit from extra security and stability in Django, and therefore also in Django CMS.

WordPress is more independent, but is not used for the same purposes as Django. It is thus less put to the test in environments such as Instagram, Quora and Eventbrite.

WordPress and Django CMS can solve the same problems, but do so in a different way. From this it can be quickly deduced that both systems are exceptionally well suited for specific purposes. They do not necessarily solve the same problem by definition, but they each have their specialisms.

Below you can see a number of common requirements for good CMS systems among themselves, in which I explain the approach of both systems point by point.

1. Functionalities and extensibility

Usually you stop time in your website because you have a goal. You may want to build a brand, share your own recipes with the world, or present a company. Whatever your purpose, when traveling with your website will change your requirements. The trend-sensitive world of the internet will also look different again. You want to know if you can grow with you and the internet.

You want to know if you have any needs, so that your website can grow with you and the internet.

We deal confidentially with your data

One of the biggest advantages of WordPress is the possibility to choose from a large number of plugins and then install them yourself. However, it is important to pay attention to the quality of plugins, and the dedication of developers to the plugin. You walk through the large amount of plugins namely the risk that you use something that soon is no longer compatible with a new version of WordPress. And that while your site depends on it.

2. Security

With all that relevant content and visitors, and perhaps data from users, you definitely do not want your site to contain leaks. This calls into question the reliability of your brand or company. And not to speak of financial or legal consequences.

With the obligation to report data leaks this is now something to take very seriously. You often have more to protect than you might think. The leak of e-mails from the loyal subscribers to your blog, you must publicly announce according to the law. You want to keep it safe. It can also happen that someone places a piece of code in your site, through which people are redirected to malicious websites ( phishing ). CMS websites make this possible by adding administrative panels.

You often have more to protect than you might think.

WordPress is popular with hackers . Although attention is paid to safety for this reason, this does not prove to be enough in practice. A recent analysis shows that of 11,000 infected websites, 75 percent runs on WordPress . One of the main reasons for this is the large amount of not always professional plugins . For example, a serious leak has recently been discovered in the 'WP Statistics' plug-in . Although you think you do not have much to protect, this is indeed something that you have to take very seriously.

To prevent some of the common security problems, there is fortunately a plugin called Wordfence Security . It is very advisable to keep your WordPress site a bit safer. A very important tip is to look as closely as possible at the frequency of updates to the plugins that you install. And to limit the amount of installed plugins to a minimum. If frequent updates are done, this usually means that you are better protected. If you have something relevant to protect with your WordPress website, it is advisable to call in an expert to help you.

Django CMS is above average safe. A system that, as mentioned earlier, is used by a large number of very serious applications and companies . Django itself also puts safety as one of the primary reasons to use Django on their website . Therefore, much is invested in the security of the system.

Through my work I have contact with several developers working on Django himself, including one of the founders of the project. I have often confirmed that a lot of attention is paid to safety by the core group that builds the system. For the inexperienced developers in the field of security, projects have also been built to analyze the security of your Django website and institutions. This way you can gain insight into the security of the website, before it will be online. The risk of bad plugins is minimal, because plugins are only lightweight extensions on top of Django itself, instead of largely self-developed extensions.

3. Speed

The demands of visitors are getting higher and higher. It is also known that Google assesses your site at speed for determining your position. A loading time or 2 seconds is already slow to name. You actually want to ensure that your site shows the first piece of content within 1 to 1.5 seconds. The rest of the content, such as photos, can be loaded later. This article deals more with the current requirements on the speed of your website .

WordPress is very extensive, and with many plugins or some themes also pretty slow.Fortunately you have the opportunity to make your site faster with plugins that provide 'caching'. This allows the speed of your site to meet the high demands of visitors. However, it is important to pay attention to the plugins that you install, because there are many plugins that make your site a lot slower. Removing unnecessary plugins can quickly lead to a major improvement.

Django CMS has also been extended and in some cases suffers from the same complications. Because Django CMS is a system that is more focused on the larger websites for which you are better off with professionals, you at Django CMS are less likely to suffer from large bottlenecks . After all, the optimization is arranged by developers who build your website and they can respond immediately to that.

A professional developer can exercise a lot of control over the speed of your site, due to the large amount of attention that is spent on speed within Django itself. Django CMS thus enjoys the benefits of the work that has already been done within Django. Of course there is a disadvantage here that you can not control the optimization of your site with a plugin. However, this is not a problem in practice, because the different options for speeding up your site for your developer are very easy to set up.

For very heavy sites they can also choose per fragment of your site how long you want to cache and when. (Store in a place that makes your site load faster, because that one piece of content is always loaded exactly the same.) This way you can optimize the heavy parts of your site, and thus prevent any speed problems. This while leaving parts that need to remain dynamic (such as your user name in the menu, which is unique for each user) also dynamic.

4. Ease of use

You do not want to be busy for 3 hours with a simple page, and then find out that things are not right and work. Certainly not if you get a lot of traffic on your website. If something goes wrong and you have to get an expert, you also want to have the certainty that it will not happen again in the future. This is also a piece of convenience for developers.

WordPress has an extensive administration system at the back. Think of managing users, creating and building pages and managing portfolio items in your website. We often hear that new users do not fully understand how this administration panel works. But if you become more familiar with it, you can soon achieve a whole lot.

An important point to take into account is the variety of configurations between WordPress websites. A developer can add all kinds of possibilities to the system, this usually makes it more difficult to quickly find what you're looking for. Sometimes you can not see the forest because of the large amount of online guides through the trees.

Tip: Do not forget your texts on social media! Learn all about converting posts in this new training

Django CMS has both an administration panel and a fully integrated system for managing your website from the front. Because this can be explained better visually,

In addition to this system, it is also possible for developers to add all kinds of customized functionalities to the 'Admin'. This is the back of Django CMS, where you can manage users and other things. Because Django CMS builds on Django, the structure of these custom-made parts is always recognizable and well thought out. Because each Admin maintains a similar structure, management is often a bit simpler.

5. SEO optimization

Being online well and having relevant content on your website is an absolute must for online success . From a good CMS you expect to be able to add meta tags for Google and social media, manage your sitemap and more.

WordPress has excellent support for optimizing SEO in modern websites. You can add meta tags to pages from the CMS, and manage your sitemap yourself. Through plugins like " Yoast SEO " you can analyze your texts in WordPress on a lot of properties, to get a picture of the best steps to take for optimal SEO .

Django CMS also offers the possibility to add meta tags, manage your sitemap and more. You can easily do this with pre-installed functionalities from the CMS itself, per page. The functionalities you expect from a good CMS. A system like Yoast for analyzing your text is not there yet, but this is going to happen. At Luminum Group we are working on a system for Django CMS in addition to providing useful SEO analysis, also as a content analysis (this system also becomes open source, ed.). For this we use software that has already been developed by us, combined with the intelligence of Google language processing. This way you get a really human look at your text.

In addition to the systems that WordPress and Django CMS offer, you can also find very good SEO scanners online. These scanners refer you to a URL of your site, to get practical tips on the SEO quality of your page. An example of this is ' SEO Site Checkup '.

6. Costs

At the end of the month you can of course say that your site yields more than it costs you. You can express that gain in other things than money. If your site works well and attracts traffic, and you can blog with it for example, this can also be very valuable. However, it is important that this does not cost you too much, and all that you get something back for what you pay.

WordPress is very popular, that is now indisputable. There is a wide range of online services that offer a sort of 'Plug and Play' system for your WordPress website at a low price. You can theoretically live within 2 minutes with a WordPress website on your own domain, and pay little for it!

You are, however, bound by this online service, and you can not change everything on your WordPress website if you wish. This is not a problem for a popular blog. Hosting for your WordPress site with domain name, on which you do not receive so much traffic, can already be done for less than 5 euros per month. For the development of a tailor-made WordPress website, you can think with junior developers at around 35 euros per hour and for senior developers or a professional agency from 75 euros. For WordPress, builders are nowadays very easy to find.

Django CMS is usually slightly more expensive than WordPress. This is mainly paid for professional development or fully customized websites. And also the amount of knowledge that is needed for this. Django CMS is basically professional websites, so managing your website is as easy as possible.

For the hosting of a Django CMS website with little traffic you can start from an amount that starts at 5 euros, and increases to 25 euros per month. For the construction of a Django CMS website you can think for a junior developer of an amount that starts at 50 euros per hour, and for senior developers or a professional agency from 75 euros per hour. Django CMS developers are a bit scarcer. There are, in addition to us, in North Holland, a number of other companies that offer Django (CMS) development, and also enough freelancers.

WordPress or Django CMS, what is the best choice for your site?

As you might have expected, not one system is the best. Both systems have advantages and disadvantages. In terms of content, Django CMS performs better, in particular because of the big difference in safety and focus on professional developers. WordPress is the right choice to start with if you have a budget for developers. Or if you want to set up a simple site without any customized features.ng here...