PyCon Day 3: PyBlosxom

Yes, that’s right. I still have notes from PyCon that need a proper writeup. Ted Leung‘s presentation on PyBlosxom. PyBlosxom is an implementation of Blosxom that is Pythonic while maintaining the original blosxom zen.

Like any old blosxom variant, you don’t need a database to run PyBlosxom. Posts are stored on the filesystem, and most of the hard work is accomplished by PyBlosxom interacting with the filesystem. You can use whatever editor you feel most comerfortable with to create your posts. A post is stored somewhere in a folder heiarchy that also acts as categorization.

Most of the base functionality in PyBlosxom is implemented in plugins. There are also a multitude of plugins that can enhance your PyBlosxom weblog, including archives, calendar navigation, xml-rpc interfaces for the Blogger and MetaWeblog API, autopinging, logging, lucene integration, post markup engines, and more.

Developing PyBlosxom plugins seems to be a breeze too. Plugins are just Python modules that supply callback functions. They’re called by PyBlosxom at specific times, and multiple plugins can be chained together that can be called in alphanumeric or a specific order. Plugins get all of the information they need to work with in dict form. They are given http request information, configuration data, and other data that it may need and need to just manipulate that data to get the job done.

There are a ton of plugins available already, but Ted would really like to see some more comment plugins, especially with picture challenges and comment moderation.

Ted’s talk was motivation enough for Erik Smartt (who was sitting next to me in the back of the auditorium leeching power) to switch from his home grown blog software to PyBlosxom. He also converted his wiki markup code in to a PyBlosxom plugin with very little effort. Hopefully he’ll find a solution to multiple categories too.