hgblog 0.1adev-20100423

Sphinx-based blogging engine

HgBlog is a set of modifications to the Sphinx project to make it slightly more suitable as a blogging engine. It’s built for those of us who love using reStructuredText markup to write documents.

The quickstart wizard handles setting up an HgBlog for you. This includes all of the usual things that the Sphinx quickstart utility does, but it creates a Mercurial repository and installs a hook and intelligent ignores for you. The hook will automatically convert the .rst files that Mercurial is tracking into HTML using Sphinx when you commit changes to the repository.

Additionally, when you pull changes in from a remote clone of the repository, the hook will do the conversion just like when you commit locally. You can set the hook up on remote clones as well. The hook only converts .rst files that are tracked by Mercurial. This means you can work on new blog articles without committing them to the repository to have them not appear online.

Installation

There are several ways to install HgBlog:

• Using pip (recommended):

  pip install -U hgblog

• Using easy_install:

  easy_install hgblog

• From the CheeseShop

  • Download the .tar.gz file from PyPI

  • Extract the .tar.gz file

  • Run python setup.py install using the setup.py in the extracted directory

• Using Mercurial:

  hg qclone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/hgblog
  cd hgblog
  hg qapply -a
  python setup.py install

Getting Started

HgBlog leverages the existing quickstart wizard for Sphinx projects. There are some modifications to reduce the number of steps required, so you should be able to be up and running within a minute using:

hgblog-quickstart

All you need to do is:

• Provide the directory on your filesystem that shall be used for your blogging needs.

• Provide a name for your blog

• Provide your name

• Select any extensions you may want to include in your blog

Once you do that, you should have a few new directories, one of which will be called source. This is where you should write your .rst articles. When you’re done working on a particular article, you can use:

hg add
hg ci

…to add and commit it to your Mercurial repository. At this point, Sphinx will be asked to generate the HTML for your blog based on your .rst files.

TODOs

• Implement Disqus commenting

• Add RSS feeds

• Include a simple, static HTML web server for faster results