Since moving my blog to Django and Wagtail, I have been adding new features to it on a regular basis. The most recent addition is the new ability to typeset mathematical equations and formulas. To be fair, all the heavy lifting is courtesy of the MathJax project. These guys did an amazing job - they implemented, in JavaScript, support for LaTeX syntax. Quite astonishing, if you ask me. Very easy to use, assuming you know LaTeX. Works in any modern browser, including on mobile, i.e. Android or iPhone. See for yourself:

What if you find yourself managing more than one Django-based web site at the same time in production? Do you have to deploy each one of them on a separate server? Or can you manage with just one, saving on hosting expenses? How will you go about the setup in this case, ensuring smooth running of these sites side by side.

For “real” production web site, with medium to heavy traffic, it is probably the best to have a separate server. Even more so, for busier sites you might very well have multiple servers in order to handle the workload. As they say, it is a good problem to have.

Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS styling framework, originally developed by Twitter, and currently published in open source. While not the only player in that field, it remains a very popular choice for many web developers. It helps people with limited artistic abilities, such as yours truly, to create web sites that are reasonably easy on the eye. It provides many styles and utilities to make the visual layout of a web page consistent and user friendly.

Close to 15 years I have been using Drupal for my personal web sites. Drupal is a flexible and configurable CMS (Content Management System) web framework, similar to Wordpress. It has been a relatively dependable working horse for my hosting needs - simple and not too flexible, but relatively robust and reliable. It was quite straightforward to bring up a new web site via it:

1. Create a new MySQL database
2. Create a config directory for the site
3. Update the settings file
4. Go through the setup wizard
5. Configure more stuff in the admin interface
6. Voila!

Unfortunately, there are a number of drawbacks to Drupal. I was sort of ignoring those for years, mainly because it “just kinda worked” for most of what I wanted it to do. I didn’t require any advanced configuration that would necessitate code changes, and the rest was relatively simple via the admin interface. However, in the recent year or two I got frustrated with the shortcomings of the framework on one hand, and on the other I decided I did want some more advanced customisation and control over the web sites.

Django is a web development framework for Python. I used it for a few web sites, including a relatively large one. I must say, my overall impression is rather ambivalent.

First of all, Django is definitely excels when you need stuff done, quickly. A lot of stuff simply works out of the box or with minimum effort, including DB access and ORM, caching, templating and so on. And there are so many extensions available! Probably only some PHP frameworks have more plugins and extensions, but who wants to write in PHP for a living?

2020 just arrived and it’s time for something new. I have been using Drupal since 2006, so we have been together for almost 14 years! It’s an impressive journey and I am look back with satisfaction - Drupal is simple to use if it fits the requirements exactly, and I stoically avoided touching any of its smelly PHP bowls. However, with the arrival of Drupal 8 I realised, that I couldn’t migrate to it even my simple and straightforward sites. Therefore, I decided to slowly migrate to Django + Wagtail. This will require some coding in Python on my side, but I don’t mind that. I will be able to control the look and feel of my content much better with less effort, and I will hopefully enjoy adding an occasional extension here and there.