Chapter 4. Flavours
- Table of Contents
- 4.1. Flavours and Templates
- 4.2. Where To Put Your Flavour Files
- 4.3. Template Variables
- 4.4. Invoking a Flavour
- 4.5. Order of Operations to Figure Out Which Flavour to Use
- 4.6. Examples of Templates
PyBlosxom takes the data provided in the entries and by the plugins and transforms it into output using renderers. Output can be in html, xhtml, xml, or anything else--anything that you could get back from a CGI script or web application. The default renderer can be set in your config file like this:
PyBlosxom comes with two renderers: blosxom and debug.
The debug renderer displays all the data in the various parts of the PyBlosxom Request object. This is really helpful to see what variables are at your disposal and also to debug problems you might be having with plugins you've installed.
The blosxom renderer renders entries just like Blosxom does.
If you want your blog rendered using a different template system--say Cheetah or htmltmpl--implement a renderer that renders the output. This can be done as a PyBlosxom plugin. See the chapter on writing plugins for more information.
The rest of this chapter talks about the various things you can do with the blosxom renderer which comes with PyBlosxom.
4.1. Flavours and Templates
The blosxom renderer uses the same template style that Blosxom uses. As such, you can use most Blosxom flavour templates and only have to make some minor modifications.
A flavour can be thought of as a theme or an output format. For example, you could have an "html" flavour that renders the blog data in html format. You could have an "xhtml" flavour that renders the blog in a strict xhtml format. You could have a "happy-sunshine" flavour that renders the blog in html format using a happy sunshiney look and feel. You can have an "rss" flavour that renders the output in RSS 2.0 format with enclosures. So on and so forth.
A flavour consists of a series of templates each of which is a part of the page that finally gets rendered. The minimum set of templates are these:
content_type - holds the content type of the flavour
head - holds everything before all the entries
story - holds a single entry
foot - holds everything after all the entries
date_head - shows at the start of a date
date_foot - shows at the end of a date
You can have other templates as well. Many plugins require additional templates in order to work.
The template files for a given flavour all have the same file extension which is the flavour's name. For example, if you were using an "html" flavour, the flavour itself would be composed of the following files:
content_type.html
head.html
story.html
foot.html
date_head.html
date_foot.html
If you want to create a "joy" flavour, you would have the following files:
content_type.joy
head.joy
story.joy
foot.joy
date_head.joy
date_foot.joy
You can have as many flavours as you want in your blog.
 | be careful with your flavour names |
|---|---|
The one thing to be aware of is creating a flavour where the name is the same extension as file extensions of your blog entries. For example, the default extension for pyblosxom blog entries is .txt. Don't create a "txt" flavour. |
PyBlosxom comes with a series of flavours: html, rss ("RSS 0.9.1), rss20 (RSS 2.0), and atom (Atom 1.0). These flavours come as part of PyBlosxom and they will work out of the box with no modifications and no configuration changes. Additionally, you can override all or portions of these flavours. We'll talk about this a little later.
Additionally, there is a flavour registry on the PyBlosxom web-site at http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ . This is where you can submit flavours that you have created and see flavours other people have created and submitted.