| Author: | PyBlosxom Development Team |
|---|---|
| Version: | about_pyblosxom.txt 1036 2007-06-11 14:40:48Z willhelm |
| Copyright: | This document is distributed under the MIT license. |
Contents
PyBlosxom is a lightweight weblog system. It was originally a Python clone of Blosxom but has since evolved into a weblog system of its own reminiscent of Blosxom. PyBlosxom focuses on three things:
PyBlosxom is a pretty straight-forward system that allows you to do the things you need to do without building everything from scratch.
PyBlosxom is a small project. As such, we have no customer support hotline, our documentation will be eternally half-done, and it's likely you will run into problems eventually. PyBlosxom offers mailing lists through SourceForge for support, we do have some documentation, and you're encouraged to read the code.
PyBlosxom is a CGI program at its heart. While there have been changes to make it work with WSGI and mod_python and other web-servers, it's still architected as a CGI program. Using it in other ways may cause headaches.
PyBlosxom by default uses the file-system to store entries where each entry is a separate file with the mtime of the file acting as the time stamp. Files are stored in a directory hierarchy which matches the category structure of your blog. As such, each entry ends up in a single category.
We recognize that PyBlosxom will never be all things to all people and thus PyBlosxom has a framework for building plugins that are written in Python which allow you to augment and override the default behavior. There are many plugins out there already, but it's likely that you will have needs that aren't met adequately. If you don't have any interest in tinkering with plugins, then it's possible PyBlosxom is not for you.
If this program doesn't sound like something that will meet your needs or if this sounds like it's going to be really frustrating, we don't think you should use PyBlosxom. There are many other weblog systems out there which meet a wide variety of needs--there's no need to try to shoe-horn PyBlosxom into your requirements and get frustrated in the process.
However, if this invigorates you, join the mailing lists and we'll work together to make PyBlosxom better for all of us.
PyBlosxom is a file-based weblog system. Entries are stored in text files (one file per entry) in a directory corresponding to the category for the entry. The directory tree of your entries and categories is called a datadir. For more about this see install and writing_entries.
The look and feel of your blog is determined by flavours. A flavour is a group of templates. Examples of flavours include:
For more information about flavours, see flavours_and_templates. The PyBlosxom web-site maintains flavours submitted by people like you at http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/registry/flavours/ .
PyBlosxom behavior can be adjusted by using PyBlosxom plugins. Plugins are written in Python and use the PyBlosxom callback system to override or adjust PyBlosxom behavior. For more information on plugins, see plugins, writing_plugins, and dev_architecture. The PyBlosxom web-site maintains plugins submitted by people like you at http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/registry/ .
Additionally, there's a contributed plugins pack that contains many often-used plugins that are maintained by the PyBlosxom developers. You can download the contributed plugins pack from our web-site.
PyBlosxom comes with documentation in the docs directory. This should be the first place you should go to for help.
On the PyBlosxom project web-site, you can find up-to-date documentation, manuals, project status and mailing list information.
The pyblosxom-users mailing list is the place to go if you're having difficulties. Discussions from the mailing list affect the content of this manual. Mailing list information can be found on our Contact Us page.