Hello Dolphy!

Dolphy is a multisite content management system built on Django. It hosts multiple websites on one single codebase, and a single MySQL database. It's in constant development, and is developed and maintained by Moxy Park.

Django, and then some

Django is described as a "framework for perfectionists with deadlines". It tries to encourage good development practice, and has an ever-growing community. Dolphy's aim is to augment Django, by adopting its methodologies and best practices, and to tweak and alter its behaviour without ever touching the source code. Dolphy isn't a fork of Django; it's a project, just like a normal Django site.

One codebase. One database. Many sites

You only need to download Dolphy once, and it'll serve all of your new websites. Set your webserver up per our documentation and you'll never need to restart Apache or even change your configs to add and remove new sites. Or even better still, get in touch and we can help get you hosted, once a public release is available.

Who is Dolphy for?

Primarily, Dolphy is for web agencies, designers and developers. It's not an end-user tool like WordPress, and probably never will be. But that doesn't mean it's difficult to use and customise.

Dolphy for frontend developers

All sites start with a base theme (the one you're looking at now, in fact), and frontend developers can customise parts or all of a specific site's template.

Dolphy doesn't have themes, because that's not how agencies work. They design - or commission designs - for specific clients, and code those designs up into HTML and CSS. Starting from a base theme is helpful for that, and so that's why Dolphy Base exists.

There are dozens of templates that can be overridden or included. They all live in a directory called /templates, and to customise them, the developer simply copies the file to the templates directory of the site they're working on.

Dolphy in the engine room

Like any good CMS, Dolphy has an extensions framework that allows developers to add new content and functionality to single, or multiple sites. URL patterns can be replaced to suit a specific site's navigation, and new modules added to the admin area in just a few lines of code.

And the great thing is, if you already know Django, you're there. You don't need to learn a whole new ecosystem or architecture. You still have models, views and URLconfs, but with our Things model you get access to bags of great tools for free, like version control for all your content, attachments, custom metadata (including automatic keyword generation so you never have to think about the black arts of SEO again), and loads more.