Social Wordpress With Python and Mezzanine

As a front end developer, I’m always on the lookout for new Content Management Systems (CMS) to play with. Such an opportunity arose when I was tasked with learning the ins and outs of Django's Mezzanine. At first glance Mezzanine looks like other Django Content Management Systems, however it offers more freedom for customized programming and template design.

My goal was to put Mezzanine through its paces, and implement some of the basic features and privacy settings found on Facebook.

The site features include would include:

• Customizable Site registration and email activation using Backbone.js
• Photo Uploads and Albums with visibility settings, so you can decide who can see your images
• An active news feed for the site and each individual member
• A browse page that give users powerful tools to filter search results
• Friend Requests
• Member Messaging
• A sidebar with room for banner ads for monitization

To do this I decided to implement a popular WordPress social networking plugin called BuddyPress into Mezzanine. As it turns out, this wasn't nearly as complicated as I thought it would be. The biggest task was migrating raw MySQL queries to Django's native ORM. As a result, all of the core features remained intact, including the BuddyPress templates. However, some of the more advanced features are still in progress, like Django's admin pages.

I've had friends and associates work on UAT (user acceptance testing) and received a lot of feedback on bugs and different features they'd like to see included. Who knows? User groups and forums might just be a fun project down the road. Hopefully the code will be ready to share with the open source community soon.