[tomd]

xaritas's reply is a more eloquent version of what I would have written. We used Mezzanine - e.g. for http://datakind.org - before building Wagtail, which was partly inspired by Mezzanine's pages-are-just-Django-models approach. Mezzanine's excellent documentation and installation process, along with its maintainer's community management, remain reference points for us.

The areas where Wagtail departs most significantly from Mezzanine - the editor experience, moderation based workflow, content revision tracking - aren't features which can be easily tacked on to another system. Our goal is the best possible user experience for content management, and I don't think it's feasible to build that as a skin for the Django admin. In terms of structural differences, django-modelcluster [1] is a key part of what makes this user experience possible:

[1] https://github.com/torchbox/django-modelcluster

Thanks for the CMS grid link. We'll add Wagtail to it.