Djangothis For Blogging
tldr: This weekend I moved this blog over to djangothis from jekyll, this is how you can do it and why you should give djangothis a chance.
What is djangothis?
Djangothis is fundamentally a prototyping tool.
For example you think of a new web product, before you build it, you can prototype it in HTML, so you can show it to others for feedback. The problem with using static files is that you can not have a common base template from where all your HTML will be derived from, and you copy over the whole HTML. This means making modification to common portions has to be done multiple times.
With djangothis you can create a folder containing index.html, pricing.html, signup.html, and run djangothis from this folder, and djangothis will expose these files on http://localhost:8000/, http://localhost:8000/pricing.html etc. If you know djanog template language, you can then inherit from common base.html, and have a common look and feel across pages.
Djangothis has a few other niceness to help you in prototyping. It automatically maps static folder to be served on /static/. It looks for a views.py and if it is present imports it, which means you can use importd's view decorator to map views to URLs directly from views.py and have some rudimentary views for your prototype. djangothis also sets up django by looking at a file named config.yaml, so you can have custom settings, context processors, middlewares etc. Djangothis also looks for templatetags named folder, and any template tag defined there becomes available to your templates for maximum awesomeness.
And finally djangothis is "themable", what it means is you can have a folder named _theme in the current folder, and djangothis will use it to overwrite templates, and the theme folder can also contain views.py etc. To help theme writers there is also a cmds folder that can be present in theme folder that can allow themes to bundle custom commands, for example jekyll has two commands start-post and start-page, that take post title etc and create a blank document at right location, right name etc.
Here is the _theme that powers this site. You can see all the features of djangothis used in this folder. This theme is quite compatible with jekyll, so if you have a jekyll powered blog, moving over to djangothis should be quite easy.
Playing with djangothis
So you want to give djangothis a try. Install it using:
$ pip install -U djangothis
Make sure you have version number 0.6 or above.
Setup a working directory:
$ mkdir site $ cd site $ vim index.html $ djangothis Validating models... 0 errors found Django version 1.4.1, using settings None Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/ Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
Instead of starting from scratch, you may want to start from HTML5 boilerplate:
$ git clone https://github.com/amitu/djangothis-html5-boilerplate.git site $ cd site $ djangothis Validating models... 0 errors found Django version 1.4.1, using settings None Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/
If you peek into index.html, you will see:
{% extends "base.html" %} {% block title %}Home{% endblock %} {% block main %} <h1>Welcome to your site!</h1> <a href="/about.html">About this site</a> {% endblock %}
As you can see bulk of "base html" is in a file aptly named base.html, which defines a few "blocks" to be filled by templates like index.html above. This is django template system in play.
As you can see "about.html" file is available via "/about.html". If you wanted cleaner URL, eg "/about/", you can just create a file "about/index.html" and you will be done.
You are not limited just to templates, you can create custom django templatetags, request context processors, and even map views to URLs.
Go ahead, prototype away your next web project :-)
djangothis For Blog
How to use djangothis for a blog?
The differene between a site full of pages and a blog is that blog has "posts" and we want to show a list of post on the main page, or on atom.xml page, so we need the list of posts. We also have to worry about how to generate the list of posts, and then figure out what URL we want the post to be served on.
There are many ways to accomplish this, the easiest probably is to reuse what I did for my blog, which had most of the posts generated for jekyll.
Here is how to do it:
$ mkdir blog $ cd blog $ git clone https://github.com/amitu/djangothis-jekyll.git _theme $ djangothis jekyll_init All Done. Run "djangothis jekyll_post" or "djangothis jekyll_page". $ djangothis Validating models... 0 errors found Django version 1.4.1, using settings None Development server is running at http://127.0.0.1:8000/ Quit the server with CONTROL-C.
And there is your blog. Modify config.yaml file that was created by jekyll_init to your liking. Update the template HTMLs in _theme folder.
You can create a new page by:
$ djangothis jekyll_page --url /about/ "About Us" about/index.html created.
Or a new post by:
$ djangothis jekyll_post This is my awesome post!
_posts/2013-09-05-this-is-my-awesome-post.md created.
Once you are ready to push your blog to github pages for example, or any static site host, use wget to mirror the localhost:8000 site in a folder, and upload that folder.
$ wget -m http://localhost:8000
Take a look at my publish script that I use for this site.
Do let me know if you end up using this, or have any questions. :-)