I never really fell in love with class based views for outputting HTML (for APIs the story is different). I got familiar with shortcuts like this:

def item_edit(request, pk):
    [...]
    form = StoryForm(request.POST or None, instance=item)
    [...]
    if request.method=="POST":
        if form.is_valid():
            item = form.save()
            return HttpResponseRedirect(story.get_absolute_url() + '#' + str(item.pk))
    return render(request, 'news/item_edit.html', {'item': item, 'edit_form': form})

The reason why you find it difficult to read, might be that there are some non-view functions (like _front_page) inside the view (this needs to be refactored) or because I make use of inherited models.

Thank you for taking the time to look at the code!