Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: simpleblog
Version: 0.8
Summary: A simple Python blogging system.
Home-page: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/simpleblog
Author: Peter A. Donis
Author-email: peterdonis@alum.mit.edu
License: UNKNOWN
Description: Simpleblog is a simple Python blogging system. I use it to write
        and publish my own blog at http://blog.peterdonis.com. I wrote
        it because I couldn't find an existing blogging system that made
        it sufficiently easy to write, format, and publish my blog.
        
        My chief goal with ``simpleblog`` is for the system to stay out
        of my way; I want to be able to add features easily, but other
        than when I'm actually doing that, I want simpleblog to "just
        work", so I don't even have to think about it at all. That way
        I can think about what I'm writing instead. With the existing
        systems I've tried, I have ended up spending too much time
        figuring out the internals of the system in order to get things
        the way I want them. Admittedly, I have not tried many existing
        systems; but what I have read about the ones I haven't tried
        has not encouraged me that any of them would work any better
        for me. So here we are.
        
        If you just want to start using ``simpleblog``, without digging
        into its internal details, then once you've installed it, you can
        copy the contents of one of the example blogs to a directory of
        your choice, and start writing your blog there. The layout of
        the example blogs, and the files in them, will give you a start.
        Before writing any entries, you will want to at least edit the
        ``blog.json`` or ``blog.yaml`` file to customize your blog's
        metadata, and the template files in the ``templates``
        subdirectory, which give extremely plain HTML pages by default.
        
        Note that in order to use ``simpleblog``, you will need to have
        installed ``plib`` (my library of useful Python stuff, which is
        used in a number of places in ``simpleblog``). It is available
        from the Python Package Index at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plib.
        If you want to use YAML instead of JSON for your config and blog
        metadata files (I certainly find YAML much easier to type since
        I hate typing delimiters, as you will know if you read my blog),
        you will also need to have installed PyYAML, the YAML parsing
        library for Python (which in my opinion should be in the Python
        standard library).
        
        Simpleblog's Architecture
        -------------------------
        
        The structure of ``simpleblog`` is simple (no, that wasn't intended
        to be humor, it's just the way it naturally came out). There
        are five core object types: the config, the blog, pages, containers,
        and entries. The config lets you define or customize the internal
        behavior of the code, and all the other objects have a reference
        to it. The other object types fall into a simple hierarchy:
        
        - The blog contains one or more pages, plus metadata which can be
          specified in a separate file from the config file (the default
          filenames are ``blog.yaml`` (or ``blog.json``) and ``config.yaml``
          (or ``config.json``), but other filenames can be passed on the
          command line to the ``simpleblog-run`` script--see below);
        
        - Each page wraps a "source", which can be either a single entry,
          or a container;
        
        - A container contains one or more entries that have something in
          common;
        
        - An entry is the actual content.
        
        It's important to note that the above is *all* that the core
        objects implement, and it is completely general. Everything
        specific, such as what actual "sources" there are, which entries
        are in which containers, etc., is all defined in extensions.
        (Strictly speaking, there is one default container in every blog,
        which simply contains all its entries, and every blog has an
        index page, which uses that container as its "source", plus a
        page for every individual entry. But that's *all* that is in
        the blog by default. Of course, that by itself is enough to
        have a simple blog, which is part of the point.)
        
        Templates
        ~~~~~~~~~
        
        Simpleblog uses Python's built-in string templating and formatting
        to render entries and pages. The example blogs illustrate the
        basics of how this works. This is one area where I do *not* have
        any items on my To Do list; the various fancy templating engines
        out there have their uses for highly dynamic web applications,
        but for a simple blog they are, in my opinion, extreme overkill.
        But the extension mechanism is there for anyone who disagrees
        and wants to use their favorite templating engine.
        
        Extensions
        ~~~~~~~~~~
        
        Extensions allow pretty much every behavior of the four blog
        object types--everything above except the config--to be changed,
        and even allow new behaviors to be added. (I say "pretty much"
        only because I can't be absolutely positive I have allowed for
        every possibility; but that's my goal.) This is done with a
        simple (yes, you'll see that word cropping up a lot...) but
        powerful mechanism. You write a Python module that contains a
        subclass of the ``BlogExtension`` class, and implements your
        desired changed or added behaviors, and add its name to the
        list of extensions in your config file. That's it. Or, of
        course, you can use one of the extensions that come with
        simpleblog, listed below. I use all of them for my blog. They
        give good examples of how the extension mechanism can be used.
        
        (Note: Strictly speaking, since extension names will be looked
        up as Python module names, they must be valid identifiers,
        which means they can't include hyphens. However, ``simpleblog``
        allows you to use hyphens when referring to extensions, as in
        the ``render-markdown`` extension; it converts the hyphens to
        underscores before looking up the module name. Command names
        are handled the same way--see below.)
        
        - The ``archives`` extension adds containers for entries that
          were published during specific time periods--years, months,
          and/or days, depending on the config settings--and adds
          archive pages to the blog for each container.
        
        - The ``categories`` extension allows you to classify entries
          by category, and adds a container and an index page for each
          category.
        
        - The ``copyright`` extension automatically generates copyright
          metadata based on the starting and ending year of blog entries.
        
        - The ``feed`` extension generates feeds for your blog's index
          page. Both RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds are supported. This extension
          also supports archived feeds per RFC 5005 (this only works for
          Atom feeds since the RSS spec does not appear to support
          this), which lets you limit the size of your syndication
          feed file by archiving old entries.
        
        - The ``folding`` extension allows your entries to have "short"
          versions that can appear in index pages, with links to the
          entry page that shows the entire entry (including the part
          "below the fold").
        
        - The ``grouping`` extension allows entries on index pages to
          be grouped, so that group headers and footers can appear in
          addition to the entries themselves. The default is to group
          by date, which goes along with the default sorting of entries
          in all containers, which is reverse chronological; but these
          can be changed by config settings (of course they should both
          be changed consistently).
        
        - The ``indexes`` extension adds index pages to your blog that
          give links to all entries in either alphabetical (by title),
          chronological, or "key" (meaning the unique key assigned to
          each entry) order.
        
        - The ``links`` extension allows you to add links to the previous
          and next entries in your blog's containers to each entry. By
          default it only does this on single-entry pages, but this can
          be configured; also, which links actually appear on the page
          is controlled by a template you provide.
        
        - The ``localize`` extension is currently experimental; all it
          does is add a "locale" config setting if certain other config
          settings are present. More localization functionality is
          on the To Do list; currently simpleblog is only tested with
          English ASCII text.
        
        - The ``paginate`` extension allows splitting sources with many
          entries into multiple pages.
        
        - The ``quote`` extension adds quoted versions of all URLS
          found in the blog's metadata. I added this because I link to
          the W3C HTML validator for my blog's index page, which wants
          quoted URLs, and this was an easy way to avoid having to type
          them into my blog metadata by hand. :)
        
        - The ``render-markdown`` extension allows your entry source
          to be plain text using Markdown syntax; the extension then
          renders it into HTML. (Without any extension changing the
          rendering, simpleblog just uses your entry source unchanged
          as its rendered HTML.) There are config options to specify
          the output format for Markdown (the default is HTML 4) and
          to "pretty print" the output.
        
        - The ``tags`` extension allows you to add tags to your entries,
          and adds a container and index page for each tag. This extension
          uses the caching mechanism for entry metadata (see below).
        
        - The ``timestamps`` extension uses the caching mechanism to
          store immutable file timestamps. (Without any extension, an
          entry's timestamp is the last modified time of its source
          file, but this means if you make any change at all to an entry
          once it is published, its time stamp changes, which may change
          where it appears in index pages.)
        
        - The ``timezone`` extension makes entry timestamps timezone-aware
          (without this extension they are "naive" ``datetime`` objects).
          The ``timezone_name`` config setting lets you explicitly declare
          your blog's timezone; otherwise your system's local time zone
          setting will be used (note, however, that the ``utc_timestamps``
          config setting can force the timezone to UTC; see notes in the
          change log). This extension requires the ``pytz`` library.
        
        - The ``title`` extension allows you to specify a title for each
          entry in the entry's source file. (Without any extension, the
          title of an entry is the same as its relative file name or URL
          path, which is probably not what you want.) It also supports
          very simple italics and bold formatting in the title.
        
        Note that in some cases the order in which extensions are declared
        in your config file matters. The order in which extensions are
        listed in the config determines the order in which they are loaded,
        which determines the order in which they get to process whatever
        data they are processing, which can obviously make a difference
        if multiple extensions process the same data. The cases you are
        most likely to encounter are extensions that process the raw
        entry source data (the ``title``, ``tags``, and ``folding``
        extensions all do, and the ordering that is known to work is the
        order in which I just gave them), and extensions that add sources
        in the form of new containers (the ``archives``, ``categories``,
        and ``tags`` extensions) vs. extensions that need to know all the
        containers in the blog (the ``links`` extension is the key one,
        and needs to be loaded after the ones listed just now).
        
        Entry Metadata Caching
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        
        Entry metadata is often useful for putting entries into containers
        and ordering them properly. It is nice to be able to do this without
        having to actually ask the filesystem for any data on individual
        entries, by either statting or opening and reading the entry source
        files. Simpleblog provides a caching mechanism for entry metadata
        to make this simple. Just use the ``cached`` decorator on any
        property that represents metadata you want cached, and provide the
        name of the file the cache should be stored in.
        
        Commands
        ~~~~~~~~
        
        All of the above is nice, but in order to actually use it, you have
        to have some kind of front end. The ``simpleblog-run`` script provides
        one. If run without any command at all, the script simply puts you
        into the Python interactive shell, with the ``simpleblog`` package
        loaded; I find this extremely useful for testing and debugging. But
        the script can also be enhanced with commands, by a mechanism similar
        to the extension mechanism.
        
        (Note: As with extension names, hyphens in command names are converted
        to underscores before looking up the module, so you can use hyphens,
        as is done below, if you find them easier to type, as I do.)
        
        - The ``publish`` command publishes your statically rendered blog via
          SSH to a remote host that will serve it. By default it uses the
          ``rsync`` command, but a config setting allows you to change the
          command name (though it must be a command that uses the same
          command-line syntax as ``rsync``, such as ``scp``). You can also
          configure the command options and the SSH user, the remote hostname,
          and the path on the remote host to publish to.
        
        - The ``render-static`` command renders static versions of all the
          pages in your blog. A config setting controls the directory that
          the files are rendered to. For my blog, this is currently sufficient,
          since I publish it as static files.
        
        - The ``serve-local`` command serves your statically rendered blog on
          localhost for testing. You can use command-line options to change
          the host name (or IP address) and port used (the defaults are
          ``localhost`` on port 8000), for example to allow testing on a LAN.
          Since the built-in Python ``SimpleHTTPServer`` is used, it is *not*
          recommended to try to serve your blog to the Internet using this
          command.
        
        For quick help on usage, use the ``--help`` option to the ``simpleblog-run``
        script. If a command name is provided, help specific to that command will
        be shown; otherwise, general help will be shown.
        
        User-Defined Commands and Extensions
        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
        
        Simpleblog supports defining your own commands or extensions,
        separate from the ones supplied with ``simpleblog`` itself. All you
        have to do is set the ``command_dir`` or ``extension_dir`` config
        and supply Python modules that match the command or extension name
        you want to use. The command and extension loading mechanism will
        look in your user-defined directories first, so you can even define a
        command or extension with the same name as a pre-packaged one, and it
        will take precedence.
        
        To Do
        -----
        
        Add fancier example blogs to show how the various extensions work.
        
        Add documentation other than this README file, both for users and
        for developers.
        
        Add support for comments while still allowing the blog to be
        statically generated.
        
        
Platform: UNKNOWN
Classifier: Development Status :: 3 - Alpha
Classifier: Environment :: Console
Classifier: Intended Audience :: Developers
Classifier: Intended Audience :: End Users/Desktop
Classifier: License :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License v2 (GPLv2)
Classifier: Operating System :: POSIX
Classifier: Operating System :: POSIX :: Linux
Classifier: Programming Language :: Python
Requires: plib (>=0.8.4)
Provides: simpleblog (0.8)
