Confused

Hi all,

I'm trying to figure out how to adapt PyBlosxom to my needs... or indeed whether
this is possible.

Here's what I want to do.

1. Static rendering only, with rsync or FTP for uploading to the live site. No
interactivity in the published site, no comments etc.

2. Index pages only have summaries (or abstracts) of entries and links to their
"permalink" pages.

3. No need for date-based index pages, but I would like category index pages.

4. I'd like it to be possible for entries to be in multiple categories -- so
they're more like tags than sections -- and for these to be indicated by a list
in the body of the entry rather than by placement in a directory hierarchy. No
need for nesting though, only one level of categories.

I have the feeling that the directory based section stuff doesn't work well with
static rendering, in that automatically generated links tend to get broken. I
think there are some missing ".." somewhere in the relative URLs.

I think it should be possible to over-ride the category code, in much the same
way as there are plugins to over-ride the time-stamp code that takes the entry
date from the file's modification time.

5. On permalink pages, I'd like the story template rendering to be different.
For example, the <h2> at the top should contain the entry title, not the date.

6. I'd like to use the HTML entry parser, but modified to extract metadata (like
categories/tags) from the content. (I've installed the htmlentryparser plugin,
but it seems to be interacting badly with the filekicker plugin, so that while
PyBlosxom recognises foo.html in the data directory as an entry, and includes it
in index pages, the permalink page for the entry is served "as is" by filekicker
rather than passing through PyBlosxom and getting rendered/flavoured etc. I'm
using filekicker to handle images, css etc.)

7. RSS and Atom feeds: that part's working just fine.

8. I'd like to have some "static" pages that outside the main system of dated
entries and don't appear in the various index pages.

Hope this makes sense.

I guess I'm trying to use PyBlosxom as a web site management system rather than
a blog system. I've been looking at plugins like pyinclude and pystaticfile and
so on.

I think that for #2 and #5 above I need to write or modify a renderer, but when
I went through the code, it wasn't clear to me where pages were actually being
put together. I wonder if I need to extend the current set of templates. Perhaps
I just need to implement some callback functions, but again it all looks a bit
murky at the moment.

I've been messing around trying to do this (with 1.4.3) off and on for the last
couple of days. I've succeeded in modifying the HTML flavour to give the site
the styling I want, but am having some trouble understanding the structure and
where to make the other changes.

I know a bit of Python and am keen to learn more, so I'm happy to get advice
along the lines of "make a copy of bork.py and change such-and-such a function
to make it do this...".

Ian


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