Publ 0.8.0

A flexible web-based publishing framework

Publ

A personal publishing platform. Like a static publishing system, only dynamic.

Motivation

I make a lot of different things — comics, music, art, code, games — and none of the existing content management systems I found quite satisfied my use cases. Either they don't allow enough flexibility in the sorts of content that they can provide, or the complexity in managing the content makes it more complicated than simply hand-authoring a site.

I wanted to bring the best of the classic static web to a more dynamic publishing system; scheduled posts, private posts, category-based templates, and built-in support for image renditions (including thumbnails, high-DPI support, and image galleries). And I want to do it all using simple Markdown files organized in a sensible file hierarchy.

Basic tenets

• Containerized web app that's deployable with little friction (hopefully)
• Do one thing (present heterogeneous content), do it well (hopefully)
• Use external tools for site content editing
• Be CDN-friendly
• High-DPI images and image sets as first-class citizens
• Interoperate with everything that's open for interoperation (especially IndieWeb)

See it in action

The main demonstration site is at https://beesbuzz.biz/ — it is of course a work in progress! The documentation site for Publ itself (which is also a work in progress) lives at https://publ.beesbuzz.biz/

Operating requirements

I am designing this to work in any WSGI-capable environment with a supported version of Python. This means that it will, for example, be deployable on any shared hosting which has Passenger support (such as Dreamhost), as well as on Heroku, Google AppEngine, S3, or any other simple containerized deployment target.

The file system is the ground truth for all site data, and while it does use a database as a content index, the actual choice of database doesn't matter all that much. A typical deployment will use SQLite, but MySQL, Postgres, Oracle, and Cockroach are also supported.

Developing Publ

In order to develop Publ itself, you'll need to install its dependencies; see the getting started guide for more information. In particular, make sure you have compatible versions of Python and Poetry installed, and, if on Windows, you'll probably need to install the Visual C++ build tools.

As far as developing Publ itself goes, cloning this repository and running ./runTests.sh (Linux/macOS/etc.) or wintests.cmd (Windows) should get you up and running. The runtime manual test suite site lives in tests/ (with the actual site content in content/, templates/ and static/).

For developing CLI functionality, you'll have to override the FLASK_APP environment variable to be test_app.py.

Additional resources

The Publ-site repository stores all of the templates, site content, and configuration for the Publ site.

The Publ-templates-beesbuzz.biz repository provides a stripped-down sample site based on my personal homepage.

Authors

In order of first contribution:

• fluffy
• karinassuni