Re: flavours V

On Sun, 20 Mar 2005, Russell Nelson wrote:
> 
> Okay, so, I'm obviously confused.  Here's what I think ought to be easy 
> to do:
>
>  o Create a set of files which constitute an HTML flavour.
>  o Publish those files in a tarball.
>  o Be able to suck those files down, and try them out.

Let's break this down a bit...  What's difficult here?  The first bullet 
point is a matter of aesthetics--so that's difficult regardless of whether 
you're building the look and feel in PyBlosxom or WordPress or any other 
blogging system.  The second one takes 2 seconds and involves:

    tar -cvf my_flavour_tarball.tar my_flavour_dir
    gzip my_flavour_tarball.tar

The third bullet point talks about pulling flavour packs down and trying 
them out and while that could use some work, I don't think it's 
particularly difficult either.

When you say these are difficult, are you saying that there are too many 
steps involved or that it takes too much time and effort?

What ideas do you have to alleviate this?


> The default .html flavour is more than a little plain, and doesn't put
> pyblosxom in its best light.

It's definitely plain.  There are a bunch of people that use it as well 
because they're more interested in their blog's information than the look 
and feel.  People have different needs for their blog and that's cool.

For example, Joey Hess uses the plain templates:

    http://www.kitenet.net/~joey/blog/

I'm pretty sure I've run into a couple of GNOME and Debian developers that 
also use the plain templates.

I digress.

I don't think we're actively positioning PyBlosxom as the most beautiful 
blogging system.  I think PyBlosxom's strengths are as follows:

  - doesn't require a database
  - entries are text files which can be created with any text editor
  - PyBlosxom is hackable to meet your needs

I think PyBlosxom has two big weaknesses right now:

  - mediocre documentation (I'm working on this)
  - poor storage "api" (this is a goal for the next version [1.3/2.0])

The first one is a problem of almost all open source projects: the people 
that work on the project almost always work on the code, the code is in a 
constant state of flux to various degrees, and there aren't many people 
out there good at writing documentation.  I'd rate myself as a mediocre 
documentation person.  I'm mediocre because it takes me several revisions 
to figure out how to structure the information in such a way that 
non-Will-Guaraldi people can read it and find what they're looking for. 
I really do need a lot of feedback.  I'm about 1/3 done the next version 
of the documentation.  It's just a matter of how much free time I can drum 
up by ignoring other things I need to get done.  This isn't anything new.

The second one affects index caching and various other things that are 
really interesting and really useful in allowing PyBlosxom blogs to scale 
as they get really big (like Ted's blog).


I'll try to get the documentation to a point where I can generate it and 
allow you folks to look at the new version and help me fix it.  I'll try 
to get that done today and at the worst in the next couple of days.

I do apologize that all of this takes a lot of time.  But it's an issue of 
numbers...  There are dozens of PyBlosxom users (more than I previously 
expected) and only 5 part-time developers.  It's a big project for a small 
crew.

/will

-- 
whatever it is, you can find it at http://www.bluesock.org/~willg/
except Will--you can only see him in real life.


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