Getting Started with website

Prerequisites

This is a pure Python application. It runs under Python 2.5 or higher, but unfortunately not under Python 3.X. You will need the following Python libraries in place to run website:

• Babel: Used to format dates in templates
• BeautifulSoup: Used for syntax highlighting and pseudo-protocol links
• dateutil (optional): Strongly encouraged for its date_parse method. Otherwise you will have to use a stripped-down version of datetime.strptime.
• Mako: Templating system in use
• Pygments: Syntax highlighting library
• Simplejson as fallback, if there is no native json
• SQLite3 (optional): this is needed, if you want search functionality based on PHP on your site

All of these can be installed via pip or easy_install.

Installation

Install either via pip or easy_install:

$ pip install website
$ easy_install website

or download website from Github: github.com/Boldewyn/website and unpack it somewhere in your Python path. Alternatively you can use the website folder directly to start your project in.

Starting a Project

Create a folder and change into it:

$ mkdir my_site && cd my_site

Create a folder _articles. In that folder you will put your posts later.

$ mkdir _articles

Create the configuration file _config.py:

$ cat <<EOCONFIG > _config.py
> URL = "http://example.com/"
> TITLE = "My new blog"
> AUTHOR = "Your Name"
> EOCONFIG

If you want to modify the default templates, create a folder _templates and put there any template that you want to change (see the installation of website for the template file names).

Finished!

Creating the Site

Put a blog post in _articles. You can use sub-folders to organize your posts. These will automatically translate to categories on the finished site.

Every blog post consists of a header of key-value pairs, then an empty line followed by the actual post in HTML. The header must at minimum include the title:

Title: A Minimal Post

<p>This is a minimal post.</p>

When you’re finished, run

$ python -m website.__main__

Your website is now in the folder site. Upload it to your web space or however you want to bring it live.