AYM CMS

The AYM CMS project was introduced in this blog entry on September 15th, 08, and the official project page is at AYMCMS.com.

The purpose of AYM CMS is to provide a powerful reusable tool for building complex static websites. The Django template language provides the underpinning of AYM CMS, and you can make full use of template inheritance, template tags, and template filters.

By default AYM CMS contains a few nice extras as well. All images in the images/ directory will be automatically thumbnailed and added to template context variables images and images_dict, which can be used as follows:

{% for image in images %}
<a href="{{ image.image }}>
  <img src="{{ image.thumbnail }}">
</a>
{% endfor %}

<img src=""{{ images_dict.cat_pic.image }}">

Of course you can add your own additions to the template context, either in the settings.py or build.py files. This makes it easier for you to update complex static websites without performing all the html modifications by hand.

AYM CMS also includes two helpful custom template tags to promote quick and featureful static content: markdown and syntax. The markdown tag simply surrounds a block of Markdown formatted text, so you can write static content in Markdown instead of HTML. The syntax tag is used for creating syntax highlighted code snippets.

Usage is simple:

{% load aym %}
{% markdown %}
Render this **in Markdown.
{% endmarkdown %}
{% syntax ruby %}
def a(b):
  return b
end
{% endsyntax %}

Give AYM CMS a try, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at the websites you can create with minimal pain and still host on even the crappiest of shared hosting.

Download

You can download the template zip here, or you can clone the GitHub repository here.