About blohg

blohg is a Mercurial-based blogging engine written in Python, built on the top of the Flask micro-framework and some of his extensions. All the content of the blogs is stored inside Mercurial repositories and the repository history is used for build the posts and pages.

Motivation

Everybody knows that we have a big number of blogging engines lying around the blogosphere, but there’s not a lot of choices for programmers, that are used to work daily with source-code editors and version control systems, and may be more productive when blogging using these tools, instead of the fancy WYSIWYG editors and administration interfaces.

Actually this isn’t the first project trying to implement a VCS-based blogging engine, but most of the existing projects aren’t tied to a VCS and are just using text files that can be versioned with a VCS, without take all his advantages.

This project uses Mercurial as VCS, reStructuredText as markup language and Jinja2 as template engine. All of them are pretty popular on the Python ecosystem and pretty easy to use.

Basic concepts

These are some of the basic concepts needed to understand how blohg works. Additionally, you should know how Mercurial works, the reStructuredText syntax and the Jinja2 syntax.

Pages

Pages are composed by static content, like an “About me” page. They aren’t listed in atom feeds or in the home, and you may want to create a menu entry manually in the template. Pages are .rst files stored in any directory inside content/, excluding content/post/. Sub-directories are allowed.

Posts

Posts are the dynamic content of a blog. They are shown on the home page and atom feeds, ordered by publication date, descendant. Posts should be stored inside the directory content/post/. Sub-directories are allowed.

Tags

Tags are identifiers that are used to classify posts by topic. Each tag generates a HTML page and an atom feed with related posts. Tags aren’t allowed in pages, just posts.

Main features

These are some of the cool features of blohg:

• Support for static pages and posts.
• Support for tags for posts.
• Support for aliases, making it easy to migrate from some other blogging engine.
• Support for building a static version of the blog, to host it in restricted environments.
• Post/page metadata grabbed from the Mercurial repository.
• Plenty of reStructuredText directives available, to make the blogging experience as smooth as possible.
• Easily customizable by Jinja2 templates.
• Can be used as a full-featured CMS.
• Support for pagination for posts.
• Atom feeds for posts and tags.