Blogofile

Blogofile 0.6 is released today. If you've been following along on github, you'll have noticed that there are more commits that have not made it into a release than otherwise. This is my own fault for not adhering to the Release Early, Release Often axiom. I apologize! I hope to be better about this in the future, in fact, 0.7 (and maybe even 1.0) should be right around the corner.

That said, 0.6 is a major milestone in Blogofile development and I'm happy to see the product mature as many people have helped out on the mailing list by giving great suggestions as well as patches.

Changelog (in rough chronological order):

• Posts can now have arbitrary user-defined fields.
• Added Controllers, which enables users to write their own extensions to Blogofile in userspace. Blogofile no longer has any intrinsic knowledge of what a 'blog' is, this is all controlled in userspace inside a new _controllers directory.
• Added Filters, which enables people to write their own text processors, for example: syntax highlighters.
• Easily debuggable in Winpdb by setting the BLOGOFILE_DEBUG=t environment variable. (this is equally usable by actual Blogofile core developers, or in your own user extensions).
• Non-broken unicode support throughout templates and blog posts.
• Lots of unit tests.
• reStructuredText support for blog posts.

Thanks again to the many supporters of Blogofile!

As far as the commit history goes, it's been way too long since a released version of Blogofile. There has been a flurry of things happening with Blogofile over the last month, numerous people having started testing Blogofile out, suggesting new features, and even sending patches.

I really like the current Blogofile. It's running both blogofile.com and enigmacurry.com (my personal blog) quite well. But we're not done yet. Blogofile started out as a personal project so that I could build my own sites the way I wanted to, and although that has been greatly expanded so that other's could start using the app too, there's still a bit left in Blogofile that is a bit, shall we say, hard coded for the way I like to build sites. Blogofile is soon going to get an overhaul that will allow it create a much more diverse range of types of Blogs, as well as other types of sites, while still trying to keep the simple sites simple. A fine, delicate, line to walk to be sure, but I think it'll make for a better Blogofile. I'm excited to get working on these enhancements, but before we get ahead of ourselves, and seeing as the master branch is looking pretty good the way it is, it's time for a new release of Blogofile.

New, for Blogofile 0.5 (roughly in commit order):

• Syntax highlighting of page templates.
• New Python _config.py file replaces config.conf. This change really appeals to me, we have something that resembles Emacs style configuration rather than a Windows INI file.
• init command that spits out a skeleton of a Blogofile site in the current directory, with multiple templates to choose from.
• Blogofile is now MIT licensed.
• Lots of new unit tests.
• Org-mode mark up for posts
• Automatic permalink generation if you don't explicitly set it in the post.
• Replaced OptParse with ArgParse for better command line UI.
• New documentation.

You can install the new version with a simple:

sudo easy_install -U blogofile

I've started to compile all the Blogofile documentation I've written into one place.

I've also started a mailing list for all thing Blogofile related. Please feel free to give feedback, ask questions, or suggest new features there.

I've just released Blogofile 0.4.

Nothing terribly major, but it does represent a maturing product:

• Less buggy syntax highlighting now with a home-grown <pre> tag parser
• EnigmaCurry.com, my personal blog, is now powered by Blogofile. This shows that real blogs can and do run Blogofile.

The development version of blogofile now includes the following features:

• Syntax highlighting - thanks to pygments
• Markdown support - thanks to markdown in python

Check out some examples here