Ink is a content management system designed from the ground up to integrate nicely with the Django Admin. In contrast to Django's other excellent CMS options, Ink has been built around three common pieces of content: Articles, Blog Entries, and Landing Pages.

Ink exposes these objects to the Django Admin, with pre-built editor interfaces that facilitate efficient, media-rich content creation.

Content follows a state-based workflow, so an object can be edited and revised until it's ready for publication. It can also be reverted back to a prior version with a few clicks.

Following publication, all objects are made available through Django Rest Framework API endpoints. The associated models, serializers, and viewsets behind these endpoints can be customized as-needed. This means that Ink functions as a headless CMS without any added configuration, and can communicate with any frontend application (including those built with Vue or React) if you choose not to leverage Ink's built-in views and templates.

If you don't need a heavily-customized frontend, Ink also comes with views and templates for quickly deploying a blog. This includes a ListView for displaying all blog posts, and a DetailView for displaying a specific blog post. Both are built out with Material Design using Vuetify, and support customization through Django settings variables that are passed to the frontend app.

• The project is built with recent versions of Django in mind. For best results, use Django >= 3.0 with Python 3.6 or higher.
• Ink uses JSONField extensively, so your database must be PostgreSQL.
• The app uses Django Rest Framework. This is installed as a dependency, but you'll also need to add rest_framework to your INSTALLED_APPS if you'd like to use Ink's API endpoints.
• Thumbnails are generated through easy_thumbnails, which must be present in your INSTALLED_APPS.

NOTE: The following installation steps assume familiarity with setting up a python environment and Docker project. For a more detailed, beginner-friendly walk through, refer to our getting started guide.

• Install the library with pip install ink-cms
• Add the following three apps to your settings.py:

  INSTALLED_APPS = [
      ...
      "easy_thumbnails",
      "ink_cms",
      "rest_framework",
      ...
  ]
  

• Ensure that you have an entry for ink_cms.urls in your urls.py:

  from django.urls import include, path
  from ink_cms.views import BlogEntryDetailView, BlogEntryListView
  
  urlpatterns = [
      ...
      path("admin/", admin.site.urls),
      path("ink/", include("ink_cms.urls"))
  
      # Optional URLs for pre-built blog templates
      path("blog/", BlogEntryListView.as_view()),
      path("blog/<slug:slug>/", BlogEntryDetailView.as_view()),
      ...
  ]
  

• Run python manage.py migrate

Log in to the Django Admin with either a superuser, or a user that has been given read/write access over all objects within the ink_cms application.

You can edit Article, BlogEntry, or Page objects within the admin interface. Saving an object creates a "Revision" that can be reverted back at any time within the History panel at the top of the editor.

Only content that has been published is available to end users, so when your changes are done, push "Save and Publish" to create a publication revision.

At that point, content is available to both the API endpoints, and the Django Views that Ink provides.

See: configuration

Contributions are greatly appreciated. The project has been designed to provide an enjoyable experience for contributors as well as end users. Part of that work is a fully-dockerized development environment, and instructions for how to get up and running.

To get started, visit our contribution documentation.

Visit our roadmap to see what new features will be added soon, and (after reviewing existing issues) feel free to file an issue request for things that you'd like to see.

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

If you are having issues, please let us know. Look through the project's existing issues in GitHub, and then create a new one if your issue isn't covered.

From contibutors to end-users, thank you to everyone who's contributed to this project.

Special thanks in particular to the developers and maintainers behind these open source tools, without which Ink would not be possible:

• Backend:
  • Django
  • Django Rest Framework
  • Poetry
• Frontend:
  • Vue
  • Vuetify
• Development
  • Docker
  • Docker Compose

Finally, if you'd like to support this project further, you can buy me a cup of coffee through GitHub Sponsors.