DJ Press

A blog application for Django sites, inspired by classic WordPress, available on PyPI.

Warning - very alpha.

Goals

Why build another blog engine? These are my goals...

• Simple to get started with sensible defaults: install plugin, configure urls.py, and migrate.
• Follows Django patterns: configuration in settings.py, content management in the Django admin.
• Configurable to suit a wide variety of use-cases: lots of configuration available, but not required.
• Customisable with themes: themes can be written using only template tags, no knowledge of models required.
• Customisable with plugins: simple plugins are easy to write, but complex plugins are possible.
• Powerful but lightweight: provide core functionality, allow plugins to fill gaps and enhance.

Versioning

This package uses semantic versioning, but until we reach version 1.x.x, the following rules will apply:

• MAJOR version will remain on 0 until the base functionality is complete.
• MINOR version indicates that an incompatible or breaking change has been introduced.
• PATCH version indicates a bug fix or a backward compatible change.

If you choose to use this package prior to version 1.x being released, please pin your requirements to a specific minor version, e.g. djpress~=0.31.0

Installation

• Install djpress by adding it to your requirements file, e.g. djpress~=0.31.0 (see versioning note, above).
• Add it to your INSTALLED_APPS in Django:

INSTALLED_APPS = [
    # ...
    "djpress.apps.DjpressConfig",
    # ...
]

• Add the URLs to your project's main urls.py file.

The following will set DJ Press to be available at the root of your site, e.g. https://example.com/

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    path("", include("djpress.urls")),
    # ...
]

If you want your blog to be in a subdirectory, use something like the following:

from django.urls import path, include

urlpatterns = [
    # ...
    path("blog/", include("djpress.urls")),
    # ...
]

• Run migrations: python3 manage.py migrate

Note that this relies on the Django Admin for content management, so ensure that you have a user with at least staff status to manage content.

Configuration

In your settings.py file, create a DJPRESS_SETTINGS dictionary. Here are some common settings:

# DJPress settings
DJPRESS_SETTINGS = {
    "SITE_TITLE": "My Awesome Blog",
    "POST_PREFIX": "{{ year }}/{{ month }}",  # blog post URLs are prefixed with "year/month": /2024/10/blog-post-slug/
}

There are lots more settings available. Please check the docs or look at the source code: src/djpress/app_settings.py

Development

Development requires PDM 2.28 or newer because the example plugin is a PDM workspace member. From the repository root:

pdm install -G :all
pdm run python example/manage.py runserver

The root library and djpress-example-plugin are installed editable into the shared environment. The Django project in example/ is an unpackaged consumer of both, so it is run directly rather than installed as another workspace package.

Use pdm run pytest for the current environment, or pdm run nox --session test for the complete supported Python/Django matrix. The justfile provides shortcuts for the common development, test, documentation, build, and release commands.

Documentation

Documentation is a work-in-progress, but is available on GitHub Pages: https://stuartmaxwell.github.io/djpress

Badges