Re: pycon talk?

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004, Ted Leung wrote:
> 
> pyblosxom is a weblogging system written in Python.  It uses the 
> filesystem storage model pioneered by blosxom, but has diverged in terms 
> of internal architecture and organization.  pyblosxom takes a 
> microkernel approach to blogging software by providing a small core 
> framework that embodies the blogging data flow.  This framework provides 
> a plugin mechanism that allows users to insert their own functionality 
> at specific points during the data flow.  This functionality can range 
> from alternate page rendering to comments to calendar based archives.
>
> pyblosxom has a growing user base and a small, friendly development 
> community.  Our goal for this presentation is to increase awareness of 
> blogging in the Python community, provide an introduction to pyblosxom 
> and its capabilities, and describe enough of the pyblosxom internals to 
> attract additional developers to the community.

I like these two paragraphs--they're pretty solid.


> The outline for this talk will be:
>
> * Introduction/Overview

You should be able to pull that together using what you wrote above 
along-side what exists in the old wiki and what's on the new web-site.

> * Installing and Configuring Pyblosxom
>  * flavors

I have pieces of the documentation for templates on line.  The rest is in 
the wiki still.


>  * plugins
>     * comments
>     * categories
>     * archives
>     * searching
>     * metaweblog
>     * caching
>     * conditional http

This part I'm a little hesitant about.  Are you planning on talking about 
how these plugins fit in with PyBlosxom's architecture?  Are you planning 
to talk about how to install these plugins?  If the latter, then which 
plugins are you talking about specifically because, for example, there are 
several searching and archives plugins in the plugin registry.

I dunno...  I think if it were me, I'd do a quick blurb on plugins in 
general: where to get them, how they're generally installed and 
configured, and what resources exist to build your own.  Then maybe list 
some of the plugins that are currently available.


> * Pyblosxom Architecture and Internals

If you can be more specific about what this entails, I can help you 
write/plan it out.  I did up some lifecycle stuff in the pyblosxom manual, 
but haven't gotten in-depth about callbacks and plugins yet.  Chapter 7 is 
about callbacks.  Chapter 8 will be about building plugins.


> * Example plugin source code
>   * comments
>   * categories
>   * XMLRPC related plugins, xmlrpc_metaweblog

The web-site doesn't talk about xmlrpc plugins at all, which is a bit of a 
shame, since the xmlrpc framework we have is pretty slick (in my opinion) 
and flexible.

That's something I'll add to my todo list to fix.

Going beyond that, I have no idea how solid the xmlrpc_bloggar and 
xmlrpc_metaweblog plugins are or what state they're in.

I'm wondering if we shouldn't get people to "own" contributed plugins so 
that we can maintain some kind of status on them.


> * Future directions

We need to fix the storage "api" to allow for "index caching" (that's what 
I'm calling the work that Bill Mill is doing).  We also need to give some 
attention to all our contributed plugins and fix the ones that don't work 
or are otherwise not up to our current standards.

Mmm...  I think there's a todo list in the wiki, but I haven't touched it 
in months and I don't know what state it's in.

I'll try to finish up the flavours and templates chapter in the pyblosxom 
manual today.  And I'll try to spend some time on the callbacks chapter 
tomorrow.

/will


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