A permissioned CMS, shipped inside one summer break

San Antonio School District needed a content management system in a few months so schools could submit information over summer break. Miss the window and the data collection slips a year.

The requirements were not simple. Visibility rules had to work at the level of individual objects and even individual attributes, for different users. Neither our client nor our internal business analyst team had hit the usual CMS traps before, so part of the job was anticipating them on their behalf.

Choosing boring on purpose

I researched the options and worked through them with our developer team, the CTO and the business analysts. I chose Django, and the reasoning was entirely about the deadline: built-in permission controls, a usable admin panel, object change history out of the box, and easy extension points. Pairing it with Celery gave us asynchronous report generation without a second framework.

Building something custom would have been more interesting and would not have shipped in time.

What I owned

I was development lead. I oversaw technical delivery across the project and made protecting the collected data the top priority, since this is student information. I also built the ETL that pushes approved submissions into the School Report Card database.