Re: pycon talk?

Thanks for the quick feedback.   Just one piece of clarification.  You 
don't have to bust your tail to get all the documentation all lined up. 
  We'll have to supply a paper for the conference in March, so we have 
some breathing room.  We just need an outline of the presentation.  
More comments below


On Dec 29, 2004, at 11:46 AM, will guaraldi wrote:

> 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.

Is there anything that I'm not saying that I should be saying/

>
>
>> 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.

The focus in this section is configuring and installing.   I want to 
give people an idea of what's there.  The list of plugins is taken from 
my config.py, although I did generalize things like archives and 
searching.  I'll probably just talk about what I have installed.

Good points that I didn't have are:
1. the plugin registry
2. general plugin installation and configuration.

>
>
>> * 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.

There's two categories of stuff here.   First I think I want to talk 
about plugins, because I hope that more people will write plugins than 
hack the core.  But I also want to talk about the core/framework 
because we do have some things (see below) where we could probably use 
some help.

>
>
>> * 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.

+1

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

I use the xmlrpc_metaweblog (which in some cases falls back to 
xmlrpc_blogger) on a daily basis to post and manage posts via Ecto or 
MarsEdit.  For that last little while I'm the only person that's worked 
on them, so you can consider them mine.  I also will probably work on 
an Atom API plugin one of these days.

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

+1

>
>
>> * 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.

More docs are always good, and needed for a 1.1 release.  But don't 
feel under pressure to fix docs for this proposal.

Ted



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