pelican 2.4.4

A tool to generate a static blog, with restructured text (or markdown) input files.

Pelican is a simple weblog generator, writen in python.

• Write your weblog entries directly with your editor of choice (vim!) and directly in restructured text, or markdown.

• A simple cli-tool to (re)generate the weblog.

• Easy to interface with DVCSes and web hooks

• Completely static output, so easy to host anywhere !

Files metadatas

Pelican tries to be smart enough to get the informations he needs from the filesystem (for instance, about the category of your articles), but you need to provide by hand some of those informations in your files.

You could provide the metadata in the restructured text files, using the following syntax:

My super title
##############

:date: 2010-10-03 10:20
:tags: thats, awesome
:category: yeah
:author: Alexis Metaireau

You can also use a mardown syntax:

Date: 2010-12-03
Title: My super title

Put you content here.

Note that only the date metadata is mandatory, so you just have to add that in i your files. The category can also be determined by the directory where the rst file is. For instance, the category of python/foobar/myfoobar.rst is foobar.

Features

Pelican currently supports:

• blog articles

• comments, via an external service (disqus). Please notice that while it’s useful, it’s an external service, and you’ll not manage the comments by yourself. It could potentially eat your data.

• theming support (themes are done using jinja2)

• PDF generation of the articles/pages (optional).

Getting started — Generate your blog

Yeah? You’re ready? Let’s go ! You can install pelican in a lot of different ways, the simpler one is via pip:

$ pip install pelican

Then, you have just to launch pelican, like this:

$ pelican /path/to/your/content/

And… that’s all! You can see your weblog generated on the content/ folder.

This one will just generate a simple output, with the default theme. It’s not really sexy, as it’s a simple HTML output (without any style).

You can create your own style if you want, have a look to the help to see all the options you can use:

$ pelican --help

Why the name “Pelican” ?

Heh, you didnt noticed? “Pelican” is an anagram for “Calepin” ;)

Dependencies

At this time, pelican is dependent of the following python packages:

• feedgenerator, to generate the ATOM feeds.

• jinja2, for templating support.

• pygments, to have syntactic colorization

• docutils and Markdown

If you’re not using python 2.7, you will also need argparse.

All those dependencies will be processed automaticaly if you install pelican using setuptools/distribute or pip.

Source code

You can access the source code via mercurial at http://hg.notmyidea.org/pelican/ or via git on http://github.com/ametaireau/pelican/

Feedback !

If you want to see new features in Pelican, dont hesitate to tell me, to clone the repository, etc. That’s open source, dude!

Contact me at “alexis at notmyidea dot org” for any request/feedback !