Welcome to django-rstblog documentation¶
django-rstblog is a Django app to manage a blog, driven by articles written
using reStructuredText, or Markdown or HTML.
This is its documentation.
Contents:
General introduction¶
The basic idea is to adopt a hybrid publication model, halfway between a static site (pure html) and a dynamic one (all inside a DB, as Wordpress).
In practice, the author writes his article locally, at his/her PC, then
- he puts a series of lines of text at the top of the article; they serve to categorize it, indicating the language used, the title, and other attributes …
- and a line of text, of fixed format, which separates the attributes from the article content.
Finally he calls an address (URL) of the site that allows him to upload the article. If the user is not logged in to the site, this address asks for username and password.
When the article is uploaded to the site, django-rstblog uses its attributes
to classify it in the database. The content of the article is not loaded
in the DB; when necessary, it is resumed from the file uploaded on the site.
If the author wants to modify the content of the article (or its attributes), he edits the file on his PC, then upload it again.
Why use django-rstblog?¶
What are the reasons that led us to this design choice? The following:
- we can always count on a local backup of all the contents of the site;
- we can work without an Internet connection, and connect only when we want to upload;
- the program is extremely light, it runs smoothly on servers with limited CPU capacity as with little RAM and HDU space (as long as accesses are contained, and we haven’t this problem :-);
- we do not renounce the flexibility and speed of research that a DB allows;
- if we have a few articles [1] the DB can be implemented with the support library
of Python (
sqlite3), without using big programs (in the sense that they commit a lot of resources) as MySQL, or PostgreSQL, …
Features¶
The features that the app currently implements are:
the index of articles, indicating the number of consultations of each article and the main attributes;
display of an article;
upload of an article;
complete reconstruction of the DB starting from the files of the articles uploaded to the site;
administration of the DB contents using the Django’s admin interface; use this interface to:
- manage a list of authors of the articles;
- manage a list or arguments to classify the articles (an article must belong to an argument);
articles may have translations, they can be present in more than one language;
indication of site statistics; in the sense of how many articles are loaded, how many languages are used, how many articles are present in each classification topic and language.
Note that, at least by now, django-rstblog is capable to manage sites with
a single blog. It isn’t developed to manage multi-blogs sites.
Cons¶
What are the cons to the use of this environment? You must have a good knowledge of Python/Django:
- to customize the app to your needs;
- to install it in a django project and in a production server.
License¶
This work is distributed under a MIT License license.
References¶
This project is hosted on GitHub
Here you will find the complete environment
needed to develop the django-rstblog app. It means: not only the app, but
even a minimal django project that hosts it.
If you wish to see a website implemented using this app, you can navigate to the author’s website.
And the full documentation is hosted on Read the Docs.