May 24, 2010 |
company news, django, gondola |
4 comments
I’m pleased to announce that Gondola for Real Estate, our GeoDjango-backed real estate CMS is publicly accepting new customers. A couple weeks ago, we quietly re-launched gondolacms.com with some details about the platform and what it has to offer, as well as some sites that have been built on it over the last few months.
History
A couple of years ago, we were building websites for some local real estate agents and realized that what they wanted couldn’t be shoehorned into the popular CMS frameworks available at the time. Somewhat reluctantly, we set out to reinvent a CMS that met their needs written in Django. Eventually, the client-specific bits were extracted and Gondola was created. It has been under the radar for the last few months while we tweaked the system with a small group of early adopters and it is to the point now where we ...
In the process of prepping Gondola CMS for public consumption, we’ve grown from having a developer (me), to having a development team. One pain point that quickly arose was the amount of time it took for new developers to setup a local development environment. In addition to our source code, the project depends on nearly a dozen other Django apps and Python packages. Initially, we simply tracked the requirements in a text file, but it required a lot of manual work to get them downloaded and installed.
Necessity is the Mother of Invention
Of course, this problem has been tackled many, many times before1. As I looked into what was out there, my first thought was that most of the existing options were far too complex for our needs. If I didn’t grok a system after clicking around the docs for 10 minutes or so, I moved ...
Gondola is our content management system built on top of Django. I briefly showed it off during my DjangoCon Lightning Talk, but have been wanting to give it a proper screencast for a while. Here’s an introduction:
A few common questions I don’t tackle in the screencast:
Is this an open source project?
As of right now, no. I do plan on spinning off a few bits as open source over time. In fact, the WYSIWYG editor is already on Google Code as django-admin-uploads. Unfortunately it hasn’t been synced up with our in-house code in a while and isn’t working on 1.0. We’ll get that updated at some point in the near future.
How much will it cost?
I haven’t settled on a pricing structure yet, but I want it to be affordable for small businesses.
Our first iPhone development project hit the App Store last week and is already over 1k users! Check them out @takemyspot #iphone #geodjango
Pete, 3 weeks ago
Troubleshooting OpenID is just like user/password. Except you have 5 of them and and you don't know which one is failing, and 3 login pages
Pete, 1 month, 1 week ago
The final tally is in. 8 Lincoln Loopers attending DjangoCon. 3 US, 4 EU, and 1 NZ. Looking forward to it!
Pete, 1 month, 2 weeks ago
Twitter / Dustin Curtis: I'm flying to Madrid tomor ... Dustin Curtis travels to Berlin, Bangkok & Madrid in exchange for design services as the result of a late night tweet. Pete, 1 month, 2 weeks ago
