Blogging with Django/Turbogears?

I remember seeing a extremely short tutorial on making a blog with Django (or was it Turbogears?) somewhere.

I’m really willing to spend some time with something other than Plone for a change, and would like to experiment with migrating my blog to one of those technologies and see how far I can get.

Some of the features that I am after are:

  • Simple tagging
  • Trackback support (optional)
  • Support for blogging APIs, like the Blogger API, Movable Type API,
    etc.
  • Some support for WebDAV (optional)

Optimally, I would like to find that I don’t need to implement any of those, that they are ready to be used as addons, in the core framework, or as wsgi middleware.

Does anyone out there know if this is asking too much or if this already exists? I have googled around and found something about the ‘django gallery’, whatever that is, supporting a minimal part of the
Movable Type API.
Comments welcome.

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6 thoughts on “Blogging with Django/Turbogears?”

  1. …
    Tasty is kind of an interesting tagging app. It’s from TurboGears, but it’s a web service, so it’s generally applicable. I suspect Django has tagging built into their models. I thought everyone had given up on trackback, so I haven’t seen anything about that. Demokritos implements the Atom Publishing Protocol as a server, maybe? It implements something related to it. It’s associated with the Leonardo blog software.

    There’s not many WebDAV servers out there. PyFileServ has one for WSGI, but it’s really much more complicated to configure than it should be — it would be better if it was just dead simple and relied on other pieces for authentication, mapping, etc. I’d really like to strip that down; I started with it a bit, but lost momentum on that before I committed anything.

    A good commenting system might be a more useful piece to reuse. Titus Brown had a WSGI commenting middleware, though I suspect it is pretty minimal.

  2. thanks!
    great comments. looks like all the pieces are mostly there, except the blogger/movable type api. maybe i should look into extracting that from the django gallery thingie.

  3. TurboGears blogs
    A couple of blogs have been created for TurboGears over time, but both projects have been abandoned at this point (AFAIK). TurboBlog and Toasty Goat were the names of the two projects. They *do* have a fair amount of functionality implemented, but their authors just ran out of time to make them full-featured.

    Most people are working on apps that are either "more interesting" than blogs or that pay the bills. If you really want a blog that "just works" and is full-featured, I’d recommend WordPress. Yes, it’s PHP, but I don’t suffer from NIH.

    Implementing a blog is easy enough in TurboGears (and Django, too, I’m sure). But adding all of the features you get for free in WordPress takes a lot of time. Toasty Goat and TurboBlog could be a starter if you’re interested in such a project.

  4. WordPress
    WordPress is pretty cool, feature-wise, but it suffers from the same problem that most PHP apps suffer from: poor security.

    Worse, WP seems to have serious issues with their QA process. I know of at least one patch for a security flaw that was accepted and then inadvertently reverted by a later "fix". Even more-worse <wink> it hasn’t been fixed since. The provider of the patch gave up in disgust (no, it wasn’t me).

    If you want a Python-based blog, I’d take a look at Frog: http://snakelets.sourceforge.net/frog/
    It’s also available in PyPI, so you can easy_install it. I’m not sure how feature-complete it is, but it might be a good starting point.

  5. Taking a break
    Hey Sidnei,

    I am heavily involved with a drupal project right now, and I have to say I am gathering great intel to bring back to plone. I know it’s (blech) php, but it tries to cover so many similar use cases that I got alot out of it.

    I hope to post more on the plone blog about my experiences, but I would say it would be well worth your while – not so much for coding as for assembly of existing modules with the aim of solving particular (familiar) problems.

    Also, I have written a plone integration layer for tasty – http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/PloneTasty/trunk/ (not yet documented or released, but definitely working).

    be well,
    /Jonah

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