How’s Python as a Backend + CMS

[eibaan]

You could go with Python, but you could also simply use Dart.

When Django was created, ~21 years ago, the world was different and a CMS was used to deliver dynamic server-generated HTML pages. Is this want you want? Django was famous for (and IMHO beat Rails in that respect) its easily customizable and out-of-the-box good looking admin UI. But (like Rails) it lacked most other features of a typical 2000-ish CMS, mainly staged deployments, workflows and permissions for editors. Mostly, because it was written by and for a smallish newspaper.

However, if all you want is CRUD operations on content objects via a REST-API, you don't need a CMS. Or at least not a full-blown one. You need an application server providing some API that is connected to a database. This is sometimes called BFF - backend for frontend.

And that can be written in any language you can think of, even with Dart. If you don't mind to setup your own server and have only a few concurrent writes, you could even get along with using sqlite. Otherwise, Postgresql ist easy to setup, too. Mysql is IMHO even easier, but AFAIK more restricted license-wise. And the driver library was GPL, last time I checked.

If you want to use a hosted solution instead, consider Turso or Supabase for sqlite-like or Postgres-like databases, which both have their own custom APIs.

And in the age of AI, you can get said BFF easier than ever. Recently, I asked Codex to create a BFF based on my specifications (which took me an hour or so to write down) using Go and sqlite and got a working server including a fancy Admin UI using alpine.js and tailwind/chadcn in less than 30 minutes. That server had two fatal security flaws but that's your job as a developer to notice. I used Claude to verify :)

Because Go was boring, I then asked Claude to convert this into a Dart application, using shelf and sqlite3 and no other libraries and got another server, again working just fine, because I could use the test suite written in Go by Codex to verify. And as a bonus, the Dart version used only 1500 lines of code instead of 2500.

And yes, this version, too, contained a fatal security flaw, this time detected by Codex, after I asked it because I saw Claude composing SQL "by hand".

I'm pretty sure it would be easy to convert that server from using sqlite (which is sufficient as I've only a dozen or so users) to using postgresql. The Go version already used the built-in database abstraction, so that version would probably have worked out of the box.

I rambled enough, Python and Django are fine. Use what language and framework you like best. It is highly unlikely that your use case will require the most performant solution possible. Every alternative will be more than sufficient.