django CMS 3.4 is here, and it's the first release of the free and open source CMS that comes with long-term support (LTS).
In my django CMS review which I published a few months back, I remarked that:
“There's no doubt about it, Django CMS is an excellent platform for projects large and small. It's simple enough for anybody to approach, although its true potential will need to be unlocked by a developer familiar with Python.”
Matteo Larghi, the CXO at Divio and member of the django CMS technical board, gave CMS Critic an exclusive comment as he and the rest of the django CMS team released version 3.4. He claimed that, “this is a historic date [for django CMS], since it's the first Long-Term Support version.”
django CMS 3.4: What's New?
The video above does a good job of explaining the new features that can be found within django CMS 3.4, but here are the highlights:
- An Improved editing experience:
The Edit page view now displays complex content better. We've removed some extraneous markup and made some fundamental changes to the editing model to eliminate differences in appearance between draft and published views. - More editing shortcuts:
Keyboard navigation has been improved and extended. An overview of keyboard shortcuts in editing mode is available by pressing “?”. Especially useful is a new “Shift + Space” command to switch between structure and content mode while highlighting the current plugin, revealing its position. - Revamped user permissions:
The content permissions system has been significantly reworked. During this process a number of issues were discovered and addressed. The system now behaves now as expected. We recommend that owners of sites using permissions upgrade to 3.4, as some of these issues represent potential security problems. - Speed:
The rendering speed of plugins in the structure view has been significantly increased.
For a complete summary of all updates, see the django CMS 3.4 release notes.
It's Finally Here: Long Term Support for django CMS
All previous versions of django CMS came with no promise of long-term support. Which was a bummer.
But with django CMS 3.4, the django CMS team has proudly announced long-term support, meaning that security patches and bug fixes will roll out until at least the end of 2018.
This is an important milestone in the history of django CMS, which was voted in at the Best Open Source CMS of 2015 not too long ago.
