Blogofile

Why a beta release?

It's been a long time since the last Blogofile release. I've moved the work that Ryan started forward to make the core static site builder "pluggable", and move an example blog engine into a plugin. There is certainly more work to do, but the codebase is stable, and in pretty good shape now. It builds the this site, my personal site (douglatornell.ca), and several other people's sites and blogs. So, a release is in order. Doing a beta release is an opportunity to make sure that the packaging is correct. There are still some minor issues to clean up (see the 0.8 milestone in the GitHub issue trackers). There is also lots of updating to do in the docs.

And, finally, there is the issue of migrating sites from 0.7.x to 0.8. Several people have offered to help figure out and document that process and I'm calling for that help now. At this point I honestly don't know what the best strategy for that migration is - a recipe in the docs, a helper script, ... If you are using Blogofile 0.7 or 0.7.1 please try out 0.8b1 and tell the community how you migrated your site. You can leave a comment on this post, the mailing list, or you can clone the GitHub repo, add to the Migrating Sites from 0.7.x to 0.8 section of the docs, or add a migration helper script to the converters/ directory, and send a pull request.

What's New

• Blogofile is now the static site builder that has always been at the core of the Blogofile project. blogofile_blog is a Blogofile plugin that provides templates, controllers, and filters (and even some sample posts) to use Blogofile to create a simple HTML5Boilerplate based blog.

  I realized in the run-up to this release that import dependencies between Blogofile and blogofile_blog make the installation steps less straight forward than I had hoped. For now:

  pip install Blogofile
  pip install blogofile_blog
  

  in that order (or your favourite easy_install or python setup.py incantations) are what's needed. I'm hoping that the installation story can be improved, perhaps with the help of the stevedore library, but I didn't want to delay this release any longer to explore that.

• The documentation source files have been moved into the project repository. They are built and rendered at http://docs.blogofile.com/ thanks to the readthedocs.org service.

• The init sub-command syntax and functionality have changed; see blogofile help init.

• The configuration system has been refactored. The default configuration settings are now in the default_config.py module.

• As a result of the refactoring of the initialization function, and the configuration system, the site_init directory has been eliminated.

• There is improved Unicode handling in slugs, thanks to Wasil Sergejczyk. See https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/blogofile/issues/124

• The codebase has been unified for Python 2.6, 2.7 and 3.2 (no 2to3 or 3to2 conversion required).

• The command line completion feature has been removed so as to avoid maintaining a bundled version of the argparse library (included in the standard library for Python 2.7 and 3.2+). It will be installed by setup.py from PyPI for Python 2.6.

See CHANGES.txt in the repos for more details on bug fixes, etc.

Breaking Changes

If you've been using the Blogofile plugins branch and the blogofile_blog repo from GitHub but haven't updated in a while you should take note of the following:

• In the past the functions in blogofile.util were available in templates in both the bf.util and the bf.config.util namespaces. The latter no longer works. If you want to use a blogofile.util function in a template, use bf.util; e.g. bf.util.site_path_helper.
• The constructor argument for blogofile.plugin.PluginTools is now the plugin module, rather than its name. This change only affects people who have developed their own plugins. See blogofile_blog.__init__.py for an example of how blogofile.plugin.PluginTools is now instantiated.

Into the Future

I had a long list of hopes and goals when I became the maintainer of Blogofile a few months ago. I've accomplished some of them in this release, but there is more work I want to do, and more ideas I want to explore.

Part of that is the idea that there can be an ecosystem of plugins around the Blogofile core that allow users to add features, themes, etc. to their blogs, and allow Blogofile to be used to build other kinds of sites. In that context, blogofile_blog is the reference plugin implementation for developers. But for that to really work the plugin API needs to be well defined, and well documented. That's not the case now. The API is still definitely subject to change, and documentation of it has barely begun. Getting that all whipped into shape is one of the goals for the next release.

There are also feature suggestions, requests, and even some fully developed patches in the issue trackers on GitHub. For example:

• When using blogofile serve, add automatic site re-compilation when a source file changes instead of having to stop the server, build, and restart the server.
• Develop a better syntax highlighter for posts that use reStructuredText markup.
• Add more conversion scripts from other blog platforms.

I had to set those aside in order to get 0.8 to a release. I hope that some of those enhancements will mature and be released in the coming months.

I'd like to thank Ryan for creating blogofile, and for his support of my efforts to move blogofile forward. Thanks also to the many members of the community who have contributed bug reports, pull requests, and discussion and answers on the mailing list.