XBlog

This is a messy blogging system for Django. It was originally designed to work tightly with a couple of related projects, XComments and XGallery.

It has some interesting features, including Blogging API support for:

Metaweblog
Wordpress
MovableType

This project is intended to fix up that support, and modernize it for current versions of Django.

Development

Setting up a developer environment is easy using pip and virtualenv:

mkdir ~/code/xblog_dev
cd  ~/code/xblog_dev
virtualenv .
. bin/activate
pip install -r xblog/requirements.txt

Start a test project

django-admin startproject xblog_dev
cd xblog_dev

Get the xblog code:

git clone git@github.com:rubeon/xblog.git

Settings

Add xblog and it's dependencies to your list of applications:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'django.contrib.sites', # dependency
    'markdown_deux', # dependency
    'bootstrap3', # dependency
    'xblog', # dependency
    )
SITE_ID=1 # SITE_ID should be set up here.

Choose a path on your site for the blog, and update urls.py accordingly:

    url(r'^blog/', include('xblog.urls'), name='blog'),

Create your dev environment's database:

    ./manage.py syncdb

If you're going to be using xmlrpc API access, add the following settings to settings.py:

XMLRPC_METHODS = (
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.blogger_deletePost', 'blogger.deletePost'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.blogger_getRecentPosts', 'blogger.getRecentPosts'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.blogger_getUserInfo', 'blogger.getUserInfo'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.blogger_getUsersBlogs', 'blogger.getUsersBlogs'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_getUsersBlogs', 'wp.getUsersBlogs'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_getOptions', 'wp.getOptions'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_editPost', 'metaWeblog.editPost'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_getCategories', 'metaWeblog.getCategories'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_getPost', 'metaWeblog.getPost'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_getRecentPosts', 'metaWeblog.getRecentPosts'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_getUsersBlogs', 'metaWeblog.getUsersBlogs'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_newMediaObject', 'metaWeblog.newMediaObject'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.metaWeblog_newPost', 'metaWeblog.newPost'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_getCategoryList', 'mt.getCategoryList'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_getPostCategories', 'mt.getPostCategories'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_publishPost', 'mt.publishPost'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_setPostCategories', 'mt.setPostCategories'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_supportedMethods', 'mt.supportedMethods'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.mt_supportedTextFilters', 'mt.supportedTextFilters'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_getUsersBlogs', 'wp.getUsersBlogs'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_getOptions', 'wp.getOptions'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_getTags', 'wp.getTags'),
    ('xblog.metaWeblog.wp_newPost', 'wp.newPost'),
)

Templates

Your base.html template should contain the following blocks for xblog:

{% block extrahead %}: Contains meta tags and stylesheet information
{% block subpagetitle %}blog{% endblock %} - can be used to append to the pages title tag

Installation

On Ubuntu 12.04, this is fairly easy to install.

$ sudo apt-get install python-django git python-markdown python-beautifulsoup
$ mkdir -p ~/dev/x/
$ cd ~/dev/x/
$ django-admin startproject mysite
$ cd mysite
$ git clone https://github.com/rubeon/xblog.git

Create a file in the project directory (e.g., ~/dev/x/mysite) called settings_local.py with the following settings:

DEBUG=True
TEMPLATE_DEBUG=True
SITE_URL = "http://youbitch.rupert.subcritical.org/"
INSTALLED_APPS = (
    'django.contrib.auth',
    'django.contrib.admin',
    'django.contrib.contenttypes',
    'django.contrib.flatpages',
    'django.contrib.markup',  
    'django.contrib.sessions',
    'django.contrib.sitemaps',
    'django.contrib.sites',
    'xblog',
    # 'common.xcomments',   
    # 'common.xgallery',
)

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.sqlite3', 
        'NAME': 'mysite.db',
    }
}

TIME_ZONE="Europe/London"
ROOT_URLCONF='mysite.urls'

Edit the urls.py so that /blog and /admin are defined:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin:
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    (r'^blog/',include('xblog.urls')),
 
)

In the bottom of settings.py for your site, you can import this file's contents:

from settings_local import *

Setup the database:

PYTHONPATH=$PWD:$PWD/.. python manage.py syncdb

Next, create a script to run the server in local mode for debugging:

#!/bin/bash

PYTHONPATH=$PWD:$PWD/.. python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:9111