I blog in ReSt Part 1

I blog in ReStructured Text Part-1

Nowadays everyone blogs. Blogs have become the medium for people to express almost everything. So I started blogging in January on Blogger. Initially I was satisfied with it but started feeling cramped for features. Wordpress and PyBlosxom looked like good alternatives but it was the latter that impressed me the most. I wanted to blog using PyBlosxom. Then I realized, what's the point in knowing Django and still not writing your own blog app.

My requirements for the blog were:

• Markup based: The reasons for choosing markup were

  • I have a poor memory and can't recollect the 100's of HTML Tags.
  • Check out http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/ref/rst/introduction.html#goals

• File-System based: Storing all the contents of the blog in a database didn't appeal to me especially when you are restricted by 40 Megs of RAM by your hosting provider (I am not complaining, that's all that I can afford).

Once done with the requirements, I started scripting for my blog and here is a step-by-step process of how to go about it. The blog can be built for any markup langauge like Markdown, PyTextile or ReSt.

• First fire up a django project.

$ django-admin.py startproject myproject

• Then start a new application called blog_app.

$ python manage.py startapp blog_app

• Edit the settings.py to add a database engine and a database of your choice. I used SQLite because it is a lightweight database with a very small footprint. Also add django.contrib.markup, django.contrib.admin, blog_app in the INSTALLED_APPS.
• Open the models.py file in blog_app and create a new Model. The blog will also support tags using Django-Tagging

from django.db import models
from tagging.models import Tag
from tagging.fields import TagField

class Blog_Model(models.Model):
    blog_title      = models.CharField(max_length=250)
    blog_date_pub   = models.DateField()
    blog_file_name  = models.CharField(max_length=250)
    blog_tags       = TagField(max_length=255)

    def save(self):
    # Override the save method of Model.
        super(Blog_Meta, self).save()
        self.tags = self.blog_tags

    def _get_tags(self):
        return Tag.objects.get_for_object(self)

    def _set_tags(self, blog_tags):
        Tag.objects.update_tags(self, blog_tags)

    tags = property(_get_tags, _set_tags)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return self.blog_title

• Save the above code and run syncdb from the project directory.

$ python manage.py syncdb

• Uncomment the admin urlpattern from the urls.py file and run the server.

$ python manage.py runserver

• Go to the admin url in your webbrowser and add a few entries to your Blog Models.

In the next part we see how to write the views and templates for the blog.