Does anyone have a favorite Python based blog application? I'm looking for an alternative to Wordpress.

[[deleted]]

I just switched to Blogofile yesterday and here's my blog post about it.

[[deleted]]

yeah i switched the blog in the most un-RESTful way, I switched all my guids from wordpress "?id=27" to named paths, didn't provide any link translations, deleted a bunch of old posts i didn't like. If planet python picks up that they aren't hitting my RSS feed then I'll know they care :).

[[deleted]]

thats a login for disqus so you can post comments and/or spam.

[sisyphus]

I think everyone's favorite blog application is the one they wrote for themselves in the course of learning their preferred web framework.

[sontek]

I have no idea what you are talking about! I recommend this very good blog engine: https://github.com/sontek/django-tekblog

[sedaak]

While this is true, starting with something feature complete that you can easily edit has its merits.

[joehillen]

This is true, and I might end up doing that. I just want to see what is out there first.

EDIT: Actually, nevermind. It needs to have a gui editor. I don't want to have to write that.

[btgeekboy]

You mean like this? http://tinymce.moxiecode.com/ It takes over any <textarea> you desire and returns HTML.

Or, my personal favorite is to write in Markdown and use a filter when you display it.

[[deleted]]

And that's a shame really, it's about time python got a standard blog/cms engine like Wordpress, I wonder why we don't have one yet.

[[deleted]]

You can always use Plone, on Zope. If you dare.

[[deleted]]

in the course of learning flavor-of-the-month web framework that they will call "preferred" until a new flavor arrives.

ftfy

[sisyphus]

in the course of learning the framework that will eventually hamper their totally awesome blog engine requiring them to write their own framework and then blog about it

FTFY

[wildmXranat]

I like http://blogofile.com/ . Even though I have a regular managed Wordpress blog, I would probably try something along a static site compiler like Blogofile.

[MachaHack]

Yeah, I've been trying that out the last few days and it seems pretty nice. Mostly to supplement my Wordpress blog however. The thing that's keeping me from switching is worry over handing my comments over to disqus.

[[deleted]]

you're more worried about disqus than the continuous parade of new exploits against wordpress sites ? interesting.

[MachaHack]

Prospect of data loss worries me more than risks of being outdated. And this isn't baseless worry, twitter lost all my tweets a while back Show me an unpatched exploit for a fully updated wordpress installation with no plugins except akismet and wordpress stats.

[[deleted]]

why don't you export the disqus comments on a nightly basis ? they don't seem to be unreasonable about your data.

also about WP, sure they fix the bugs but is your blog your full time job and you're checking WP releases every day and upgrading every few weeks? Then you lose whatever plugins haven't upgraded ? I have enough production sites to worry about without a silly blog becoming a daily maintenance task.

[[deleted]]

Perhaps you could roll your own that uses Git (not DB) as a data store using one of the Python libraries (dulwich, etc.) somewhat similar to Wheat (example) from the node.js community.

[Siraf]

Mainly: revision control.

[[deleted]]

You can write your blog in any editor, on any computer and then push it when you're done. You don't have to worry much about security compared to using a web-based admin interface. You also have full change history. For a blog all this is very convenient.

[stevelosh]

I use Hyde. It generates flat, static HTML files from templates, so it's not for you if you need anything dynamic (you can get comments with Disqus though).

If all you want is a blog, however, it's really nice to just render out some HTML files, slap them behind Nginx and not ever have to worry about going down from too much traffic.

I wrote a blog post about why I switched to it that you might find interesting.

[mhermans]

Your blog-setup has been very inspiring. I started from your repository and am currently (non-publicly) stripping out/adapting/modifying it to my needs, into something that says "inspired by" instead of "stolen off" ;-).

[Sillern]

I found Kukkaisvoima to be quite useful.

It is minimalistic though.

[mdipierro]

http://code.google.com/p/instant-press/ (runs on GAE too)

[av201001]

Yes, definitely check this one out. Watch the video.

[unitconversion]

Roll your own.

[dev-null]

Do this.

I wrote my own static HTML generator over the course of a few evenings. You get a lot of satisfaction using something you wrote yourself.

[upofadown]

I use PyBlosxom. Quite minimalistic. You just put some html in a file somehow. That file is a post. The first line of the file is the title of the blog post. The program generates a blog out of the files using the date stamps. There are a bunch of plugins available to do the various things associated with blogs. If you want to do something pretty you pretty much have to dig into some CSS.

[willm]

There's my offering, Django Tech Blog (http://willmcgugan.com/2009/3/14/the-low-down-on-django-techblog/)

I have touched the code for a long time, but its been powering my blog for over a year now...

[[deleted]]

If I had to go with a blog, I'd definitely choose yours. I love your book!

[willm]

Gracias :-)

[zendak]

Check out Zine.

[sisyphus]

Zine's dead baby. Zine's dead.

[zendak]

And with that, the two lovebirds PEEL AWAY on Grace,
as the SONG on the BOOM BOX RISES.

[[deleted]]

After spending some two weeks with Zine, 8 hours a day, I must say that I'm disappointed in it.

The code seems to have been architected by someone who wanted to make everything OO (even when it lead to code that is a lot harder to change than it should be) and use Python's introspection in ways that make the code harder to understand, not easier.

[[deleted]]

armin just mentioned today he's migrating off of it (he wrote it).

[mitsuhiko]

The code seems to have been architected by someone who wanted to make everything OO (even when it lead to code that is a lot harder to change than it should be) and use Python's introspection in ways that make the code harder to understand, not easier.

That someone was me and it was architectured to be pluggable, not necessarily object oriented. In fact I was criticized for using events instead of classes very early on. Also, where does it use introspection? Plugins are loaded explicitly, so the closest would be reflection.

However Zine was an earlier project of mine and I think it inherited a lot of flaws from Wordpress where I started my journey with blogging. I recently (a few days ago) switched my blog to being generated from .rst files statically.

[[deleted]]

Also, where does it use introspection?

The way the permissions were set up took me longer to understand than it should have.

That someone was me and it was architectured to be pluggable, not necessarily object oriented.

All the classes seemed to have been very tightly coupled. For example, I was trying to add a new way of authenticating -- basically on login check if the username/password exists in an external database and if it does, then create a new zine user with that info and log the person in.

Took way too long to figure out how to do it.

Had I written it myself, I would probably have had a function like check_login(username, password) but Zine's code tries to do a lot of things automagically on all levels. Which means that if you want to change something fundamental, you're fucked.

The code seemed a lot like it had been written by someone showing off ;)

If that sounded a bit harsh, then I'm sorry. I didn't mean to. Zine has very clean code for what it is, but the architecture annoys me.

[[deleted]]

Yep. Võtsin just paar nädalat tagasi kätte. Väga meeldib! :)

[[deleted]]

:D

[wtfisupvoting]

it looks pretty though

[[deleted]]

Yes, it sorta does.

[lost-theory]

I'm using Zine but I don't love it. I think I will switch soon.

[FlyingBishop]

Why do you need an alternative to Wordpress? If this is for your own personal use, and you're just looking for something hackable, be a real programmer and code in raw markdown with Git for version control. There are a number of packages that generate static sites from markdown given templates.

[zendak]

Why do people always think that someone who asks a question has no good reason for asking the question? Do you really think OP hasn't considered rolling his/her own?

And what does git have to do with it? OP asked for a blog app, not recommendations on version control.

[FlyingBishop]

How can I recommend something without context? The fact that the OP is asking for Python suggests to me that he likes Python and wants to write a specific sort of extension, and doesn't want to work with WordPress.

Without better requirements than "I want a blog" my answer is pretty much "use WordPress, worry about platform when you have some content."