Overview
Mezzanine is a content management platform built using the Django framework. It is BSD licensed and designed to provide both a consistent interface for managing content, and a simple architecture that makes diving in and hacking on the code as easy as possible.
Mezzanine resembles tools like Wordpress, with an intuitive interface for managing pages and blog posts. Mezzanine takes a different approach from other Django applications in this space like Pinax or Mingus that glue together a lot of reusable apps, instead opting to provide most of its functionality included with the project by default.
Visit the gallery of sites powered by Mezzanine to see some of the great sites people have built using Mezzanine.
Features
On top of all the usual features provided by Django such as MVC architecture, ORM, templating, caching and the automatic admin interface, Mezzanine provides the following features:
- Hierarchical page navigation
- Save as draft and preview on site
- Scheduled publishing
- Drag-n-drop page ordering
- WYSIWYG editing
- In-line page editing
- Drag-n-drop HTML5 forms builder with CSV export
- API for custom content types
- SEO friendly URLs and meta data
- Search engine and API
- Configurable dashboard widgets
- Multi-device detection and template handling
- Shopping cart module (Cartridge)
- Blogging engine
- Themes
- Tagging
- One step migration from other blogging engines
- Disqus integration or built-in threaded comments
- Gravatar integration
- Google Analytics integration
- Twitter feed integration
- bit.ly integration
- Sharing via Facebook or Twitter
- Custom templates per page or blog post
- Built-in test suite
- 960.gs integration
The Mezzanine admin dashboard:
Dependencies
Mezzanine has no explicit dependencies apart from a standard Django environment using:
Mezzanine is designed however to be used most effectively in conjunction with the following libraries:
- Python Imaging Library (PIL)
- django-grappelli <= 2.0
- django-filebrowser <= 3.0
- South
- pyflakes and pep8 (required for running the test suite)
Browser Support
Mezzanine's admin interface works with all modern browsers. Internet Explorer 7 and earlier are generally unsupported.
Installation
The easiest method is to install directly from pypi using pip or setuptools by running the respective command below, which will also attempt to install the dependencies mentioned above:
$ pip install -U mezzanine
or:
$ easy_install -U mezzanine
Otherwise you can download Mezzanine and install it directly from source:
$ python setup.py install
Once installed, the command mezzanine-project
should be available which
can be used for creating a new Mezzanine project in a similar fashion to
django-admin.py
:
$ mezzanine-project project_name
You can then run your project with the usual Django steps:
$ cd project_name $ python manage.py createdb --noinput $ python manage.py runserver
Note
The createdb
command performs the same task as Django's syncdb
command, and also handles setting the initial migration state for South.
You should then be able to browse to http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/ and log
in using the default account (username: admin, password: default
). If
you'd like to specify a different username and password during set up, simply
exclude the --noinput
option included above when running createdb
.
Contributing
Mezzanine is an open source project that is managed using both Git and Mercurial version control systems. These repositories are hosted on both Github and Bitbucket respectively, so contributing is as easy as forking the project on either of these sites and committing back your enhancements.
Please note the following points around contributing:
- Contributed code must be written in the existing style. This is as simple as following the Django coding style and most importantly PEP 8.
- Run the tests before committing your changes. If your changes causes the tests to break, they won't be accepted.
- If you're adding new functionality, you must include basic tests and documentation.
Third-party Modules
The following modules have been developed outside of Mezzanine. If you have developed a module to integrate with Mezzanine and would like it listed here, send an email to the mezzanine-users mailing list.
- mezzanine-html5boilerplate - Integrates the html5boilerplate project into Mezzanine.
- mezzanine-mdown - Adds Markdown support to Mezzanine's rich text editor.
Donating
If you would like to make a donation to continue development of the project, you can do so via the Mezzanine Project website.
Support
For general questions or comments, please join the mezzanine-users mailing list. To report a bug or other type of issue, please use the Github issue tracker.
Sites Using Mezzanine
- Citrus Agency
- Mezzanine Project
- Nick Hagianis
- Thomas Johnson
- Central Mosque Wembley
- Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation
- The Source Procurement
- Imageinary
- Brad Montgomery
- Jashua Cloutier
- Alpha & Omega Contractors
- Equity Advance
- Head3 Interactive
- PyLadies
- Ripe Maternity
- Cotton On
- List G Barristers
- Tri-Cities Flower Farm
- daon.ru
- autoindeks.ru
- immiau.ru
- ARA Consultants
- Boîte à Z'images
- The Melbourne Cup
Quotes
- "I am enjoying working with Mezzanine - it is good work." - Van Lindberg
- "Mezzanine looks pretty interesting - tempting to get me off Wordpress." - Jesse Noller
- "Mezzanine is amazing." - Audrey Roy
- "Mezzanine convinced me to switch from the Ruby world over to Python." - Michael Delaney
- "Impressed with Mezzanine so far." - Brad Montgomery
- "From the moment I installed Mezzanine, I have been delighted, both with the initial experience and the community involved in its development." - John Campbell
- "You need to check out the open source project Mezzanine. In one word: Elegant." - Nick Hagianis
- "Who came up with the name Mezzanine? I love it, like a platform between the client's ideas and their published website. Very classy!" - Stephen White