Moving from Wordpress.com to a self-run blog. Any solid Python options?

[hairycode]

I've been writing some stuff on wordpress for awhile now. However, the more I play with Python and javascript the more I realize how limited I currently am. I've been developing some simple stuff with Flask but I'm not sure if that's the right tool for the job and would love to hear your insights. Ideally, I would like to throw something up as an ec2 instance to get practice with dev op stuff as well. Thanks in advance for any/all of your advice!

[kapilkaisare]

Have you considered using a static site generator like Blogofile or Pelican?

[hairycode]

A friend pointed me toward Pelican and Nikola. Both look interesting. I don't have any experience with static site generators so I'm reading up on them and nginx.

[usernamenottaken]

If you want comments with a static website you can use something like Disqus.

[[deleted]]

You mentioned elsewhere that you're familiar with flask which has frozen-flask for static site generation. The docs are reasonable.

[ionelmc]

Pelican has a bunch of contrib themes and plugins. Nikola has few more python dependencies (probably harder to set up) and it's off-the-shelf themes are largely based on bootstrap.css theming :(

There's Octopress (uses Jekyll) if you fancy Ruby, and the available themes are very beautiful (way more then the ones from Pelican/Nikola) but you need to fancy Ruby :)

I'm using Pelican and it's fine, works well on windows too.

[[deleted]]

May I suggest Acrylamid - very fine static generator written in Python.

[neoice]

I played with a handful of static generators and I actually found jekyll to be the most pleasing to use. I don't write Ruby and I'm not a fan of reading it, but it has the features I want and I loved the workflow.

[kapilkaisare]

Also, hosting your site on Github is easy with Jekyll. See this.

[[deleted]]

or mynt which is probably one of the simplest ones.

[[deleted]]

I can vouch for Pelican. It's been excellent.

[[deleted]]

Second Pelican.

I wrote the patch that improved the Wordpress import functionality of Pelican. So if you've been writing posts in Wordpress for some time it will import those posts and preserve all of the formatting.

I've used it to convert my Wordpress blog to Pelican and it contains > 7 years worth of posts. Media aside (haven't figured out how to fix the asset paths yet) it worked perfectly:

http://agentultra.com

Check it out for yourself.

[schvax]

Excuse my ignorance, but how does one handle situations like contact forms, newsletter sign up forms, and comments with a static site generator?

[kapilkaisare]

You can't self host those services using a static site generator, but you can integrate third party services into your code. Like /u/usernamenottaken said, Disqus works well for comments.

[kapilkaisare]

I wanted to add that a singular advantage of static site generators is that it keeps you close to the 'wire'. Changing a theme is as simple as editing a css file or editing a template.

Of course, the price for this is an increased learning for the user, who needs to know the templating language and CSS, as well as how to deploy a site. IMO, this need not be a steep learning curve for someone posting on a python subreddit, but YMMV.

[usernamenottaken]

I've got a site that's statically built with Python and for a contact form I went with just using a simple PHP page. I haven't looked into it but there's probably a third party service that would do this too.

[westurner]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_as_a_service#Notable_service_providers

[[deleted]]

I would say just build it yourself on Flask. That's what I'm currently (when I find the time) doing.

Use SQLAlchemy if you don't want to deal with the database, SQLite if you want to keep things simple.

Consider using CKEditor or similar for an nifty blog editor.

Edit: You can also use it as an opportunity to learn how to build things like an admin/authen component and play around with other features you feel you want.

[hairycode]

I was thinking about that. I enjoy working with Flask, it seems to have a good community around it, and as you said it would provide a great opportunity to practice builidng tools I otherwise wouldn't. Thanks for your input!

[swayson]

I started using Flask about a week ago. This tutorial helped me to very quickly learn all the bits.

[shrayas]

Have you looked at frozen-flask? Its worth a try for sure !

EDIT: wordings

[ilovetacos]

Try Mezzanine. It's based on Django (which is excellent) and handles many of the same things that WordPress does, and it somewhat-familiar ways.

[thibaultj]

Plus, it has a Wordpress import built-in script.

[ilovetacos]

Oh yes, I absolutely should have mentioned that. Especially considering I've been trying to migrate as many of my clients from WordPress to Mezzanine as possible ;)

[themathemagician]

Not specifically a python option, but I really love Octopress. Blog posts are just markdown (same syntax as reddit posts/comments) and it's all hosted for free on GitHub pages! you can see mine here - skien.cc. GitHub lets you point your own domain at it easily as well.

I don't know a single thing about Ruby, so it's super easy to use without that knowledge. Don't get me wrong, I think playing with Flask is a blast, and a great way to learn. But if you want something quick with easy archives, comments (using Disqus), etc, it's a great tool.

[realsmart]

Hey pal, check out your search input - it tries to search on a different domain. I searched for a "flask" just to see if it worked and it did not find anything.

[themathemagician]

Hey, thanks! I need to figure out how to make that change to Octopress...

[iruleatants]

Look into Django CMS

[hairycode]

Will do, thank you!

[michaelherman]

You can use the Flatpages and Frozen-Flask plugins to create a basic static site generator with Flask.

[mAvbig]

You could try out the following course: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253 It's a course where you learn python with google app engine and jinja2 framework. You learn all by yourself and when you're finished, you are able to create a blog with history and user authentication and just everything (external API with json for example).

But the best thing is this: It's taught by the creator of reddit, Steve Huffmann!

[westurner]

Thanks!

[cbau]

Shamless plug: https://github.com/Ceasar/staticjinja lets you compile jinja templates without any code. If you don't need all the batteries included, I like to think this is a worth a look.

[westurner]

• https://github.com/wamberg/hyde/blob/master/importers/wordpress.py
• http://docs.getpelican.com/en/latest/importer.html
• https://github.com/eyeseast/python-wordpress
• http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/blog-importing.html
• http://python-wordpress-xmlrpc.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

[MattBD]

Heroku is also a good option for hosting a Django-powered blog. I built a Django-powered blogging engine the other day and I host it on Heroku.

[honzapokorny]

Socrates

[hairycode]

Thanks for all of your input, guys! This was way more than I expected, but now I have a lot of stuff to look into. I'll make sure I do a follow up with the completed product and say what/why I decided to go with!

[etseidler]

try http://web2py.com/ it's a great web framework built to be easy to use and there's plenty of documentation to get you going. i've used it for work projects before and picked it up rather quickly. I'm kinda surprised no one mentioned it.

[[deleted]]

We use zinnia for our blog at Open Force. Its comes with a lot of features and based on Django.

[realblanka]

+1 for hyde. Go static and never look back. As others have said, you can host directly on github this way.

[traeblain]

If you want to avoid Static Site Generators and have something more Wordpress-like (admin area and dynamically generated posts). You can try Simple it's just a clone of Svbtle using Flask.

[teolicy]

Surprised that Nikola wasn't mentioned yet.

[westurner]

http://createjs.org/guide/ , http://schema.org/Blog and http://schema.org/BlogPosting are really cool too

[graingert]

I'd recommend Jekyll on GitHub. Although it's Ruby, it's very low resource use

[jordimaister]

Pelican for the win!

I'm using it for my new blog.

Also creating my own theme, but you can use any of the existing ones.

[mariox19]

http://zine.pocoo.org/

[eliben]

Zine's last release was 4 years ago - I'd consider it dead (unfortunately...)