GLAMkit at a glance

GLAMkit is a next-generation Python CMS by the Interaction Consortium (IC), designed especially for the cultural sector. It has tools for dealing with complex events, collections, press releases, sponsors, and a institutional storytelling engine.

GLAMkit has publishing and workflow tools for teams of content professionals, and a powerful content framework, based on django-fluent. Everything is written in Python, using the Django framework.

Key features

GLAMkit has:

  • complex repeating calendared events
  • collection patterns: art, moving image, etc.
  • a story-telling engine (e.g. rich ‘watch’, ‘read’, ‘listen’ articles)
  • Patterns for hierarchical pages and collections of rich content models.
  • Advanced publishing / preview / unpublishing controls
  • Simple workflow controls
  • Content plugins for working with rich text, images, embedded media, etc.
  • Customisable site search using Elastic Search
  • django-reversion compatible, allowing versioning of content
  • press releases
  • sponsors
  • Customisable admin dashboard
  • Docker-compatible project template supplied
  • Batteries included: bower, LessCSS, Bootstrap
  • Easily extensible with models, templates, plugins, etc.

GLAMkit is delivered as a Docker-compatible package, which means that it’s easy to share a consistent development environment across your team, or to deploy on any Docker-compatible web host, including top-tier cloud hosting services like AWS.

What is ICEkit?

The engine that runs GLAMkit is called ICEkit. ICEkit is a toolkit for building CMSes, designed for teams of content professionals. One day there will be other flavours of ICEkit for other markets - this anticipated future is why the repository and some classes are named ICEkit. For now, you can treat ICEkit and GLAMkit as interchangeable.

Why did we create GLAMkit?

Every day, we at IC create and host sites for clients with demanding digital needs. Our clients have large amounts of content to work through and publish. They usually only have a small team (of busy people) who edit on the site. They usually have databases and other systems throughout their organisation that need to integrate with the site. And of course the result needs to look great and not break the bank.

GLAMkit represents the distillation of our knowledge and experience in working on technically challenging projects with these clients, and with museum clients in particular. Out of the box, it has everything that teams of content professionals need to get started creating and publishing pages of content.

We love building sites in Python/Django, and it’s a great framework to solve demanding digital challenges. But we couldn’t find a Python CMS with the enterprise-level workflow and publishing features that our clients need.

So we made one – and here it is.

More than just the software, GLAMkit also includes our knowledge about how to deploy and scale. That’s why it can be installed and deployed as a scalable Docker image, which can be installed on any Docker-compatible host, including the top-tier ones.

For more, take a look at our blog series on the future of content management.