django CMS loses its head

March 14, 2017

We're working on a 'headless' mode for django CMS, that will give it even greater flexibility and meet more use-cases.

At present, django CMS works on the assumption that it will serve its content directly to a web browser.

However, web browsers are increasingly not the only consumers of content. Mobile applications, modern frontend frameworks such as React and Angular and even technology such as digital signage systems can also consume content.

We're working towards giving django CMS the ability to serve content via RESTful APIs to any suitable system.

Progress so far

Our work so far is available publicly on GitHub at django CMS REST API. SteelKiwi and Nephila have already contributed a great deal of effort to the project, and we're looking for further help.

Try it

You test it for yourself. Have a look at the README.txt and the example application inside the example_project.

We are use Django Rest framework, so while running the project you have access to its interface by adding /api/ to your url.

Next steps

A next step will be to add a "Headless management mode" to the core of django CMS itself. This will decouple template rendering from content management, allowing for management of the django CMS plugin structure mode without using a web browser.

This should give you an idea of the power and possibilities offered by this project!

We plan to make a first full release of django CMS Rest API alongside django CMS 3.5. As ever we need the help of our community to ensure that the first release is of high quality: functional, stable and useful. We ask django CMS users to test, report issues, offer improvements via pull requests and generally to give us feedback that will help us deliver our next step in this project.