bigmouth 0.1.3

Django interface to the Pelican static blog generator.

django-bigmouth provides a Django interface to the Pelican static blog generator.

Introduction

What?

A Django app that provides a management command (run_pelican) that acts as a thin facade over the Pelican blog generation process, together with various templatetags to assist with custom template creation, and the ability to preview the blog via the development server and Django flatpages.

Why?

You might use bigmouth rather than Pelican itself if you have an existing dynamic Django app to which you want to add a static blog while making use of your app’s templating and static file setup, or if you simply prefer Django templates to Jinja templates.

Quickstart - running the example project

It is assumed that everything that is required to run Python and Django is installed on your system. We also assume a unix/BSD system, but a windows setup shouldn’t be too dissimilar to what follows.

Source

First get the source, for example:

pip install bigmouth --download=.

or the latest version:

git clone ssh://[e-mail]/devopsni/django-bigmouth.git

Buildout

In the root directory of the files just downloaded, run the bootstrap.py file:

python bootstrap.py

This should create, among other things, a local bin directory. Now you should run the bin/buildout script, but if you are familiar with buildout you might want to look at the buildout.cfg file and update as required. The eggs-directory settings is set to ../eggs, ie. a sibling rather than a child of the current directory.

So now run:

./bin/buildout

and this should initialize a local sandboxed environment. In particular, bigmouth depends on the latest Pelican and this will have been cloned from github to the develop-src directory.

If all went well, running:

./bin/django

should print a list of available management commands and these should include a command called run_pelican.

Database

Before you can create the example blog, you have to create a database and configure the Django settings file appropriately. This is the standard Django database setup step for which the Django docs provide all the info you need. It’s the DATABASES parameter in the bigmouth_example/settings.py which need to be changed to match the database you create.

If you are using postgresql you could look at the included pgreset script. This is a utlity shell script which will create a postgresql database and user. For example:

pushd bigmouth_example/etc/postgres
./pgreset
popd

or, depending on your postgresql configuration:

sudo -u postgres ./pgreset

On completion, pgreset will print the required DATABASES setting which you can then copy and paste to the settings file.

Once the database is created and configured, run the syncdb management command:

./bin/django syncdb

Note, that a database isn’t strictly required if you pass --no-flatpages as a parameter to the run_pelican command (and you are not interested in previewing the files via the development server), but a database is recommended and could well become a requirement at some point.

mkblog

Now you are ready to create the example blog application and the easiest way is to run the mkblog utility which simply wraps the call to the run_pelican command:

./mkblog

and then view the blog by running:

./bin/django runserver

and visiting http://127.0.0.1:8000/ .