Re: "pybloxsom"??

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 05:39:15AM -0500, will kahn-greene wrote:
> The second thing is that I don't particularly care for "pyblosxom" as a
> name.  It's a mouthful.  I keep misspelling it, too.

Yeah, it's a bit ugly. But it's nice to have a name that references the
blosxom roots. I always liked the idea of "posxum" because I like animal
names and I think it's funny, but it's ugly too. I think the osx in
blosxom is for OS X, but PyBlosxom seems more like a linux thing (or is
it just me?), so maybe it should have a name with li or ux or nux or
something in it.

> One of the things we've been talking about is switching renderers
> because the current one is pretty hacky and generally a poor renderer.

Yeah. I think Jinja is pretty cool.

> I think if we decided to ditch the blosxom renderer for something sane,
> then at that point, we'll have shed most of our blosxom roots.  At that
> point it doesn't make sense to continue to emulate blosxom.  And at that
> point, we could change the names and kick off a new project.  We could
> probably spend some time fixing up other legacy problems that I created
> like the total debacle that is entries.

Sounds exciting! What I really like about PyBlosxom is the ease of
posting to it because posts are just plain text files. There are many
blog, wiki and website engines that use text files for posts or pages
now but most of them, e.g. Jekyll, have a more awkward file syntax than
PyBlosxom. They make you put a YAML document at the top of the file with
certain fields, something like:

	---
	title: My Blog Post
	layout: default
	---

	Content here...

PyBlosxom's fiist line = title is just a lot nicer than this, there's
nothing to remember. Perhaps it's because I don't post often and don't
want to memorise a syntax for it.

I also think that the plugin pipeline where it's easy to write plugins
to modify things at each different stage is really neat.

The rendering engine is really what I don't like about pyblosxom.
Whenever I try to do something with pyblosxom I end up fighting against
it. It just wants me to have a blog where the front page shows the n
most recent posts in full and then there are archive pages for each
year/month/day showing all those posts in full. But that's just not the
kind of blog format that I want. There are lots of different ways that
people do their blog front pages and archive pages. So it needs more
flexibility.

I think what you want is to use a proper template language like jinja
that can have loops and conditionals and stuff, and to be able to do
custom queries against the 'database' of posts such as: get the n most
recent posts, get the titles only of all posts, get all posts tagged
something, etc, and then loop over the resulting posts and spit them out
into the page.

What I'd suggest is that each file in a flavour directory corresponds to
a URL:

	myflavour/
		index.jinja
		archive.jinja
		some_other_page.jinja
		post.jinja
		category.jinja
		year.jinja
		month.jinja

You can put whatever template files you want in the flavour, they don't
have to be head, foot and story, etc. If a visitor requests the root URL
then index.jinja will be rendered, and it might render the most recent
posts, or do whatever the template code inside index.jinja wants to do.
If the /archive URL is requested them archive.jinja would be rendered,
and so on.

post, category, year and month would be treated specially by pyblosxom.
For example, if a post permalink URL like /posts/my-blog-post is
requested then post.jinja would be rendered, and pyblosxom would pass
the requested entry object corresponding to my-blog-post to the template
code so it knows which post is being requested.  Similarly,
category.jinja woud be called to render category URLs and passed the
name of the requested category, and so on.

So although flavours are not restricted to a set of mandatory template
files like head, foot, story etc. and can define whatever URLs they
want, some URLs/template files are treated specially by pyblosxom.

I guess this sort of thing can probably be written as a renderer plugin
for pyblosxom?

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