The Best Blog Engine for Django

Intuitive admin interface

So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the blog you build with ButterCMS.

Handy integration with Django

Our Django blog engine has a simple content API and drop-in SDKs that make the magic happen in minutes, not hours.

A truly zero-maintenance solution

With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.

You've got better things to do than build another blog

Drop our Django blog engine into your app, and get back to more interesting problems.

ButterCMS is an API-based blog engine that integrates seamlessly with new and existing Django apps. It's great for SEO, and provides a clean and modern user interface that your marketing team will love. You can deploy ButterCMS in minutes using our Django API client.

That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content.

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See how Butter’s API enables you to launch a flexible blog with amazing SEO using your existing tech stack.

Best blog engine on the market

After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience. Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml

Deploy our Django starter in 30 seconds!

Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and run your local server on localhost:8000/.

$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/django-starter-buttercms.git
$ cd django-starter-buttercms
$ python3 -m venv butterenv && source butterenv/bin/activate
$ pip install --upgrade pip && pip install -r requirements.txt
$ echo 'BUTTERCMS_API_TOKEN=your_token' >> .env
$ python manage.py runserver

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Built to make content marketing easy

ButterCMS is the best Django blog engine for a simple reason: Django developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting blog templates, sidebars, related content features, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

Use main domain (improves SEO)
Friendly admin interface
Upload images, video, and other media
Edit URL slugs and meta tags
Tags and categories
Author profiles
RSS/Atom feeds
Search
Webhooks
And more...

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The simplest Django blog engine you'll find

Our simple setup saves you time and money. Take us for a spin to see for yourself!

It's the epitome of plug-and-play simplicity for content creators. It does exactly what I need it to. LUKE GARDNER, CONTENT SPECIALIST, PRINTAVO

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Fast integration with any Django app

Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Django app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding Butter to your Django app.

Of course, you can also use our Pages and Collections to do advanced content modeling. For a full integration guide, check out our Official Guide for the ButterCMS Django API client.

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See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Django app.

Seamless Django components

Empower your marketing team to create a customized blog engine that aligns perfectly with your Django components.

Components are the essential building blocks of any Django app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease.

Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Django components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.

The best Django blog engine for SEO

ButterCMS gives you absolute control over on-page SEO ranking factors. Key SEO variables are built into our default post template, giving your marketing team direct access to configure all of these settings, and more.

Page title
Post tags and categories
META description
URL slug
Featured image / Open Graph image
Image ALT tags
Link anchor text

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ButterCMS saves you development time

Most customers get our Django blog engine up and running in less than an hour. Try it yourself!

Simple as can be, with powerful features and great customer support. DILLON BURNS, FRONT END DEVELOPER, KEYME

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How to integrate ButterCMS into your Django application

Integrating the Butter blog engine into your Django app is dead simple. Here's a mini tutorial to get a feel for setting up your blog home and blog post pages.

For a full integration guide, check out our Official Django Guide.

To display posts, add a blog app to your Django project. This will serve as the basis of your blog home and individual post pages. The home page will display a list of the 10 most recent posts.

python manage.py startapp blog

Set up a new url route to this blog app in our project's global urls.py file (i.e. myproject/myproject/urls.py).

urlpatterns = [
    ...
    url(r'^blog/', include('blog.urls'))
    ]

Define the blog home route in blog/urls.py

from django.conf.urls import url
from . import views

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', views.home, name='blog'),
    url(r'^page/(?P<page>\d+)$', views.home, name='archive'),
]

Note there's also an archive named route for letting users paginate through older blog posts. It points to home view and passes in page as a param.

Then set up our home view in blog/views.py and fetch blog posts from the Butter API. The response also includes some metadata we'll use for pagination.

from django.http import Http404
from django.shortcuts import render
from butter_cms import ButterCMS

client = ButterCMS('your_api_token')

def home(request, page=1):
    response = client.posts.all({'page_size': 10, 'page': page})

    try:
        recent_posts = response['data']
    except:
        # In the event we request an invalid page number, no data key will exist in response.
        raise Http404('Page not found')

    next_page = response['meta']['next_page']
    previous_page = response['meta']['previous_page']

    return render(request, 'blog_base.html', {
        'recent_posts': recent_posts,
        'next_page': next_page,
        'previous_page': previous_page
    })

Next we'll create the blog_base.html template that displays our posts and pagination links:

<h2>Posts</h2>

<!-- List of posts -->
{% for post in recent_posts %}
    <a href="{% url 'blog_post' post.slug %}">{{ post.title }}</a>
{% endfor %}

<!-- Pagination links -->
<div>
  {% if previous_page %}
  <a href="{% url "archive" previous_page %}">Prev</a>
  {% endif %}

  {% if next_page %}
  <a href="{% url "archive" next_page %}">Next</a>
  {% endif %}
</div>

We'll also create an additional route + view for displaying individual posts:

# in blog/urls.py

urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^$', views.home, name='blog'),
    url(r'^page/(?P<page>\d+)$', views.home, name='archive'),

    url(r'^(?P<slug>.*)$', views.post, name='blog_post'),
]

# in blog/views.py

def post(request, slug):
    try:
        response = client.posts.get(slug)
    except:
        raise Http404('Post not found')

    post = response['data']
    return render(request, 'blog_post.html', {
        'post': post
    })

The view for displaying a full post includes information such as author, publish date, and categories. See a full list of available post properties in our API reference.

<title>{{ post.seo_title }}</title>
<meta name="description" content="{{ post.meta_description }}">

<!-- Post title -->
<h2>{{ post.title }}</h2>

<!-- Post author + Publish date -->
Posted by <a href="{% url 'blog_author' author.slug %}">{{ post.author.first_name }} {{ post.author.last_name }}</a> on {{ post.published }}

<!-- Post categories -->
{% for category in post.categories %}
<a href="{% url 'blog_category' category.slug %}">{{ category.name }}</a>
{% endfor %}

<!-- Post body -->
{{ post.body|safe }}

That's it! The blog posts created in your Butter dashboard will immediately show up in your app.

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About ButterCMS

What kind of database can I use?

No database required! We're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.

Do you host my templates?

Unlike CMSs you might be used to, we don't control or host any of your templates. The design of your app (HTML + CSS) lives in your application along side the rest of your app. Your application calls our Content API and we return your content in JSON format. You can then render this content in any way you'd like.

Can I import my content?

Yep. To import existing content from another platform, simply send us an email.

How do you compare to WordPress?

In short, we offer all the same easy-to-use editing capabilities of WordPress but are significantly easier for developers to setup and maintain. This means you spend less time working on your CMS and more time focusing on things important to your business.

Can I self host Butter?

No, we're a SaaS CMS or CaaS. You simply call our Content API from your app. We host and maintain all of the CMS infrastructure.

For more information on how we compare to a traditional CMS, check out Headless CMS vs Traditional CMS on the Butter blog. Do you have more questions? Read our FAQ below, or feel free to chat with us directly.

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