Introduction ============== Flother is the personal web site for Matt Riggott. It's been through many iterations but now it runs on Python 2.5 and Django 1.1 and is in active development. This is the complete source code, released under the GPL v3.0. It includes six apps that offer a blog, a photo library, geographical locations, a contact form, file uploads, and a Google-powered search. (See "Features" below for more information.) It's fairly specific to my needs but you may find it useful either as a base for your own site or to help you learn Django. You can see the code in action at http://www.flother.com/. For more information, contact me: http://www.flother.com/contact/. Features ========== There are six main apps within the project. The largest is a blog with Akismet-moderated comments. Entries are formatted using Markdown and can be public, private, or draft. Draft entries can be previewed on the site by admin users. Comments can be enabled entry by entry (i.e. one entry can have comments while another doesn't) and use Gravatar for author photos. Next are the two tightly-coupled apps photos and places. Both are currently in active development and will see a full geocoded photo library with an option to import from Flickr. Fourth comes a contact form that emails site admins each time a message is sent. Akismet is used to check whether or not messages are spam — if they are, no email is sent. Messages are stored in the database. Fifth, file uploads. Files of any type can be uploaded and stored via the admin. Thumbnails of images are created and displayed in the admin. A Javascript-based interface for using files in blog entries is provided. And finally, site search. Google's AJAX API is used (server-side) to perform a site-wide search and return results on the site itself. Future work ============= * Google sitemap for blog * Print style sheet * Home page that aggregates site content Requirements ============== The blog requires Python 2.5 and Django 1.1 and depends on the following packages: * Python Imaging Library (http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/) * Markdown (http://www.freewisdom.org/projects/python-markdown/) * Smartypants (http://web.chad.org/projects/smartypants.py/) * G. Raphaelli's Flickr.API (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Flickr.API) * South (http://south.aeracode.org/) * Django Compress (http://code.google.com/p/django-compress/) * StaticGenerator (http://github.com/flother/staticgenerator) * Typogrify (http://code.google.com/p/typogrify/) * Participation Graphs (http://github.com/flother/participationgraphs) Note that StaticGenerator is a fork of Jared Kuolt's original, to allow Nginx to server up pre-compressed version of the cache. All these dependencies are listed in a PIP requirements file, requirements.txt, in the root directory of the repository. Installation ============== 1. Clone the read-only repo git clone git://github.com/flother/flother.git 2. Install the dependencies via PIP. (If you use virtualenv you'll want to create a virtual environment and activate it first.) pip install -r requirements.txt If you don't use PIP you should wonder what you've been missing all this time, read up on it, and install it. http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/dec/15/pip/ 3. Create a Bash script so you can run the site locally. In the directory flother/flother, create a file called manage.sh and paste in the following three lines: #!/bin/bash export PYTHONPATH=..:$PYTHONPATH django-admin.py $@ --settings=flother.settings.development 4. You'll notice that the settings file Django's using in that script, flother.settings.development, doesn't exist. The settings file that does come with the code, flother.settings.common, is a base settings file containing the shared settings you'll need to run the code. You should create a settings file to use in development that first imports the common settings and then sets its own. Create a file in the flother/flother/settings directory called development.py and paste in the example code from this gist: http://gist.github.com/434537 Note you'll need to add your Akismet API key (to test comments for spam) and your Flickr API key (to download your photos to the app) to these settings. URLs to discover both are included as comments. 5. Create your local database and superuser. cd flother/flother bash manage.sh syncdb bash manage.sh migrate 6. Run the server and head over to the admin. http://localhost:8000/admin/ Note that the front-end won't work until you've created your first blog post. Once you've done that you're ready to rock and roll. http://localhost:8000/blog/ Management commands ===================== There are three management commands in the project; each one is summarised below. For more information read through the code as it's fairly well commented. django-admin.py publishnewentries Because the site can be heavily cached (if you use the Static Generator-created content you can serve the blog static HTML files), any entry published in the future will only actually appear once the cache is flushed, not once its publishing date has passed. To ensure the entry appears as expected, this command will check for entries whose ``published_at`` field is within the last hour. If there are any, the cache will be cleared. This command should be run as an hourly cron job. django-admin.py import_from_flickr Imports public photos from a Flickr account (based on settings.FLICKR_NSID) and stores them and their metadata in the database. This command should be run as regularly if you want to download your photos from Flickr.