Tutorial

How To Install And Get Started With Django-Based Mezzanine CMS on Ubuntu

Published on February 25, 2014
author

O.S. Tezer

How To Install And Get Started With Django-Based Mezzanine CMS on Ubuntu

Introduction


A content management system (CMS) is an application that aims to help people with publishing contents of various types online … at least that’s what they’re supposed to do. With ever-so-popular and growing demand, most CMS applications have reached a point where they are even harder to use than crafting your own solution based on a framework.

Fortunately, there are a handful of brilliant exceptions to this rule – Mezzanine CMS is one of them.

Built on top of the powerful (and expandable) Django web framework, Mezzanine offers web-developers and online publishing enthusiasts alike a truly smooth ride from the very beginning with its extremely intuitive way of building websites.

In this DigitalOcean article, we are going to see how to prepare a brand new Ubuntu 13 cloud server to install and deploy a Mezzanine CMS based web-site from the absolute scratch. Continuing, we will see how to get started with this elegant library as we publish our first piece of content.

Glossary


1. Django In Brief


2. Mezzanine CMS


  1. Features
  2. Third-Party Support
  3. Complete Application Modules

3. Getting Started: Preparing Your Ubuntu Droplet


4. Installing Mezzanine


  1. Python Virtual Environment For Mezzanine
  2. Install Mezzanine And Dependencies

5. Working With Mezzanine


  1. Create A Project
  2. Initiate The Database
  3. Basic Configurations
  4. Test The Application
  5. Create Your First Content

6. Getting Ready For Production


7. Summary


Django In Brief


Django is a Python programming language based web-development framework. Being an extremely large project and library, it packs and ships tons of tools and features to developers who are looking forward to getting started quickly. If you are willing to spend a significant amount of time to “learn” a framework in order to save some in the future, Django for Python is probably the go-to solution.

Given their nature, powerful frameworks are not only helpful for creating custom applications or APIs but also packaged software, aiming to solve a specific set of problems. One of these custom software built on top of Django is the Mezzanine CMS.

Mezzanine CMS


Mezzanine - as we have mentioned - is a content management system built on top of the popular web-development framework Django. Although it requires some knowledge of Python programming language and a certain level of familiarity with Django, getting started using Mezzanine to create a web-site is much simpler than other content management tools and libraries, especially those based on other languages.

Features


As a CMS, Mezzanine comes with a great amount of useful functionality that covers a majority of common needs that web-developers expect to get from such applications. Since Django is so easily expandable, Mezzanine is also surrounded with many additional third-party packages that can help you with shaping your web-site anyway you like as well. In fact, Mezzanine itself is an extension, or a Django application.

Here are some popular features of the Mezzanine CMS:

  • Scheduled publishing;

  • Drag-and-Drop (DaD) page ordering;

  • Theming via themes marketplace;

  • Account management and e-mail verification;

  • Easy social content sharing;

  • Mobile (e.g. smartphone, tablet etc.) friendly theming;

  • Spam filtering;

  • URL shortening;

  • Disqus and Gravatar integration;

  • Automated deployments;

  • Built-in blogging engine;

  • Visual content editing;

  • Tagging;

  • Customising individual content types and their styles;

  • Easy migrations;

and much more.

Third-Party Support


Benefiting from expansion capabilities of Django, Mezzanine currently supports plenty of additional libraries and modules which aim to help developers with their various needs.

Some of these popular third-party modules are:

  • mdown:
    Widgets and filters to create and publish content using Markdown.

  • Themes:
    Theme collection for Django (thus Mezzanine).

  • Captcha:
    Automatic captcha support for Mezzanine form builder.

  • Slides:
    Responsive slide display.

  • Calendar:
    Calendar implementation for Mezzanine.

  • Podcasts:
    Podcasts manager.

  • Pageimages:
    Easily adding individual background-images for Mezzanine pages.

  • Twittertopic:
    Helps to manage twitter topics.

  • Recipes:
    Recipe publishing plug-in.

Complete Application Modules


Some Mezzanine modules allows the creation of complete web-application with unique features, such as an e-commerce web-site.

Some of these popular customisation modules are:

  • Cartridge:
    An online-shopping / e-commerce module.

  • Bookmarks:
    A multi-user bookmarking application.

  • Polls:
    A polling application.

  • Careers:
    A job posting application.

  • Wiki:
    A wiki solution.

Getting Started: Preparing Your Ubuntu VPS


Mezzanine is a Python project and you need to tune your system correctly in order to set up and run your web-site without glitches or errors.

If you haven’t got your droplet ready for this yet, head over quickly to our Ubuntu/Python article:

And continue with the Mezzanine installation instructions found below.

Installing Mezzanine


We are going to make use of the brilliant Python tool virtualenv in order to install and contain Mezzanine and its dependencies. Therefore, in this section, we are going to start with creating an environment.

Python Virtual Environment For Mezzanine


If you haven’t already, create a virtual environment:

virtualenv mezzanine_env
cd         mezzanine_env

Or activate it:

source bin/activate

Install Mezzanine And Dependencies


Once we have our environment ready, we can use pip package manager to get Mezzanine and all the dependencies installed.

Run the following command to install Mezzanine using pip:

pip install mezzanine

You may also need to install pillow

pip install pillow

Working With Mezzanine


Being a Django based tool, Mezzanine comes with Django-like features. One such item shipped with Mezzanine is mezzanine-project which is used for administrative tasks.

Let’s get started working with Mezzanine.

Create A Project


Creating a new web-site with Mezzanine is as easy as running a single command:

# Usage: mezzanine-project [project name]
# Example:
mezzanine-project mezzanine_app

# Enter the application directory:
cd mezzanine_app

Initiate The Database


Mezzanine brings some additions to Django’s standard manage.py management tool, such as the created instructions.

Run the following to create and initiate a sample database:

python manage.py createdb

Once you execute this command, you will be asked a series of questions:

# You just installed Django's auth system,
# which means you don't have any superusers defined.
# Would you like to create one now? (yes/no):
yes
# ^^ Create an admin account by answering the questions.

# Please enter the domain and optional port in
# the format 'domain:port'.
# For example 'localhost:8000' or 'www.example.com'. 
# Hit enter to use the default (127.0.0.1:8000):
www.example.com:80
# ^^ Enter your domain name.

# Would you like to install some initial demo pages?
# Eg: About us, Contact form, Gallery. (yes/no): 
yes
# ^^ Create sample data.

After having answered these questions, it is time to check out the application.

Basic Configurations


In order to avoid errors and do things the right way, although not strictly necessary, we need to perform certain configurations.

Let’s edit the settings.py file using the nano text editor:

nano settings.py

Scroll down the file and find ALLOWED_HOSTS, i.e.:

ALLOWED_HOSTS = []

Replace it with:

# ALLOWED_HOSTS = []                # comment out
# Example (From Django documentation):
ALLOWED_HOSTS = [
    '.example.com',  # Allow domain and subdomains
    '.example.com.', # Also allow FQDN and subdomains
]

# Replace example.com with your own domain name.

Afterwards, go right below the block of comments and find:

TIME_ZONE = 

And replace it with your own, e.g.:

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Amsterdam'

Save and exit by pressing CTRL+X and confirming with Y.

Test The Application


Run the following command to run a sample application server to check out your brand new Mezzanine application:

python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

You can check out your installation by visiting your droplet on port 8000:

http://[your droplet's IP]:8000

Note: To terminate the test server, press CTRL+C.

Create Your First Content


Let’s publish some new content and see how easy it is to use Mezzanine.

Visit the admin section by going to:

http://[your droplet's IP]:8000/admin

Login with admin credentials you have set and press “Log In”.

You will see the Dashboard. From here, you can either publish a quick blogpost, or hover your cursor over the Content drop-down menu and choose any item you wish to edit, e.g.:

  • Pages:
    http://[your droplet’s IP]:8000/admin/pages/page/

Getting Ready For Production


When you are finished creating your Mezzanine project, you should try to avoid relying on the testing server the application comes with.

For deployments, a fully-fledged web-application server (e.g. Unicorn) must be used, preferably behind a reverse-proxy that will handle the initial processing of requests and distribution of static files, such as images.

To get a quick overall idea of how to go to production, check out the section titles "Getting Ready For Production"on our article: How To Prepare Ubuntu Cloud Servers For Python Web-Applications.

Summary


If you have already been through this article once, or simply prefer a quick summary of installation instructions to get you started, check below:

# Preare the system and install Python tools:
aptitude    update
aptitude -y upgrade
aptitude install -y build-essential
aptitude install -y cvs subversion git-core mercurial
aptitude install python-setuptools python-dev python2.7-dev python-software-properties libpq-dev
aptitude install libtiff4-dev libjpeg8-dev zlib1g-dev libfreetype6-dev liblcms2-dev libwebp-dev tcl8.5-dev tk8.5-dev
curl https://bitbucket.org/pypa/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py | python -
curl https://raw.github.com/pypa/pip/master/contrib/get-pip.py | python -
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
pip install virtualenv

# Create a virtual environment:
virtualenv mezzanine_env
cd mezzanine_env    
source bin/activate
pip install mezzanine

# Create a Mezzanine project:
mezzanine-project mezzanine_app
cd mezzanine_app
python manage.py createdb --noinput

# Run the testing server:
python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Note: The last command created using the --noinput flag will allow you to initiate the database without being asked questions. Your admin username will be admin, and your password default. From hereon, you continue with configuring and testing.

<div class=“author”>Submitted by: <a href=“https://twitter.com/ostezer”>O.S. Tezer</a></div>

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My answer based on experience would be yes, you want a virtual environment for each project. Let’s say you have two sites, mycoolsite.com and myawesomesite.com, both running on Mezzanine and including some custom modules that you built. One day, you upgrade Mezzanine to the latest version and one of the custom modules on mycoolsite.com breaks due to an incompatibility with the new version of Mezzanine. Now mycoolsite.com is broken until you figure out what’s wrong.

Virtual environments isolate the changes you make to a set of Python packages. If you use virtualenv, the packages (such as Mezzanine) are specific to one environment, and you can make changes to one environment without affecting the others. So in the example above, you would have two virtualenvs, one for each site. When you make a package change, like upgrading Mezzanine, you do so on each virtualenv individually. That means you could change the virtualenv for mycoolsite.com back to the previous version of Mezzanine and keep the site running while you worked out the kinks with the new version.

Virtual environments do take a little getting used to, but I’ve found them to be incredibly helpful. Google around, there are some very good tutorials on how to use them effectively.

Can someone please update this? There have been a number of changes and this guide is incomplete. It references gunicorn when fabric is now used, and the gunicorn article is actually not helpful because it doesn’t say how to point wsgi to a deployed Mezzanine.

Hey Guys,

Thanks again for this tutorial my project is up and running on the server but when I visit .myip:8000 I get a “webpage not available” error while the django_project installed from a one click installation is still running on my IP. Before I attempt to deploy I’d like to know what the issue is. I see that the tutorial is over a year old and followed verbatim lead me to this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

So I have setup my droplet for python/Django. I have a virtualenv setup at /opt/myenv/. Do I need to create multiple virtual environments for each python project? I am trying to setup mezzanine now that I have python setup. What if I want to add more python projects later?

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