When comparing Wagtail vs Django, the Slant community recommends Wagtail for most people. In the question“What are the best Python based CMSs?” Wagtail is ranked 2nd while Django is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Wagtail is:
Although Wagtail comes with only the most basic features, it's by no means an incomplete CMS. It's very extendable and it's up to the developer to choose how to extend it.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extendable
Although Wagtail comes with only the most basic features, it's by no means an incomplete CMS. It's very extendable and it's up to the developer to choose how to extend it.
Pro Lightweight with the most useful functionalities
Wagtail is a simple and lightweight CMS with the most basic and useful set of features baked in out of the box.
Pro Great separation between developers and editors
Wagtail has the perfect separation between developers and editors. It allows you to construct a site with minimal fuss with features like the awesome stream field and hand it over to virtually any content editor. You can build the site with no knowledge of Django and with the simple interface require no training to get started.
Although this will always require developer time, with 2 or 3 days you can quickly get up a boilerplate site that will fulfill 80% of any site you will develop. Leaving only the bespoke parts to do.
It also nicely slots into any Django project with no fuss.
Pro Developing a simple prototype can be very fast
Django's philosophy of batteries included means that experienced developers won't have to plan too much ahead on what kind of application infrastructure they need and instead just start developing web applications quickly.
Pro ORM support out of the box
Django supports Object-Relational Mapping. With models defined as Python classes which are actually subclasses of Django's django.db.models.Model
.
Each attribute of the model is then represented as a database field. Queries are lazily executed and Django gives developers an automatically-generated database-access API.
Pro Top notch documentation and help from community
The official Django documentation is probably some of the best around. Well written, thorough and they explain every little detail of the framework. Django is also a very popular tool, with an extensive community and a lot of experienced developers that have been using it for years. This means that there are a lot of guides and tutorials out there for new and experienced developers alike.
Pro Highly customizable
Django is in itself a highly customizable web framework. The database, template framework and ORM can all be swapped out.
Pro Has an admin panel out of the box
Django comes with a highly customizable admin panel and authentication out of the box. This makes the development and production of a simple CMS extremely easy.
Pro Mature software with many plugins developed over the years
Django was first released in 2005, it has had a lot of time to mature and become better with each release. It also has by far the largest community out of all python frameworks who have continuously over the years built and maintained many powerful plugins.
Pro Clear and defined MVC organization
Django follows some pretty well established MVC patterns. With everything in place and where requests follow a clear path through urlresolvers, middleware, view and context processors.
Pro Simple database management
Just a few lines of code can instruct Django to create all the tables and fields required in your database automatically. Schemas are managed with "migrations", that are also created automatically, and can be rolled out from your development box and implemented on production systems with just a single command.
This performs any database changes required, from table creation, indexes, renaming fields, and pre-populating initial data. Each migration builds on the previous migrations, so you can trace the evolution of your data and even recreate the layout of your database at any point in the lifecycle of your application.
Cons
Con ImageChooser widgets dont fully work in sub panels
Con You need to be experienced in Django to get the most of it
Installing Wagtail on a remote server is a little more complicated than FTPing a bunch of files. Furthermore there's no ecosystem for plugins and themes so it can only be fully extended by a developer experienced with Django.
Con Can feel bloated for small projects
Django's sheer scale and functionality can feel clunky and bloated for small applications. It has too many bells and whistles which can get in the way when developing a small scale application.
Con The documentation does not cover real-world scenarios
It is a larger documentation indeed, however is not deep and covers non real problems or even don't show any examples. You'll be better with Google or Stackoverflow
Con Routing requires some knowledge of regular expressions
Given a GET request for /topics/426/viewpoints/1/sections/create
, how does Django decide which bit of Python code is invoked to handle it?
It compares the request path to your giant pile of regular expressions.
And then if there's some other regular expression starts matching /top
and all your requests for /topics/
start going there, good luck figuring out why. You won't be informed of any conflict until you notice you seem to be getting the wrong pages back.
The structure of URL paths is almost universally hierarchal. There is no call to have anything as ridiculously flexible (and notoriously hard-to-read) as regular expressions to organize request routing.
Con Template errors fail silently by default
If you make a typo in a template variable, or change a view so that variable is no longer passed to the template, you won't get an error message pointing out that something has gone wrong. That reference will just be treated as if it is an empty string instead.
There is a way to configure this, but since so many templates have been written assuming this behavior, nobody ever enables template errors because it would break so much of the existing support tools (e.g. the built-in admin interface).