The sidebar, footer, "about" page and a few other things on this site all have something in common: they are mostly-static pieces of content, but from time to time I want to change something in them. So I built this little django application, named it "deco", and published it at http://grep.ro/projects/deco/. This also scratches an older itch of mine: I want a simple and powerful CMS that I can use for random small sites.

It's a simple concept: keep pieces of static content in the database, allow the user to edit them, and serve them as either standalone pages or through templatetags. Content can be input in plain HTML, Markdown, Textile, plain text (these are converted to HTML when rendered), or using the full power of Django templates. When using templates some interesting possibilites arise: for example one can recursively build a menu (by feeding a carefully-crafted data structure to a carefully-crafted template).

Right now Deco is at version 0.1. Some possible future improvements: an edit history for content; integrating html2text by Aaron Schwartz; caching of compiled templates; integrating a fancy Javascript editor into the admin interface (possibly markItUp).

I'm hoping other people find the simplicity and flexibility in Deco to be useful. I'm also thinking about building some accompanying apps, to handle static media and content grouping/syndication and maybe user rights, to build a simple CMS system. Maybe it would be useful to bundle everything with an HTTP server written in Python, thereby creating an easy-to-deploy content server. Hmm.