Technology news centering around Python
ServerZen.Net was recently updated from TextPress (svn snapshot) to Zine 0.1.2. For those that don’t know, Zine is a Python-based blog application. This blog specifically uses the Zine egg created by ServerZen Software.
Apologies for any planet aggregators that may have shown old entries as new entries.
So I’ve been spending a while looking at blog software. My preference was to continue using something Python-based so that I could troubleshoot and contribute to where time allowed. The last blog software that powered serverzen.net was Plone+Quills.
After some searching I came across TextPress by the Pocoo Team. In essence it is a WordPress clone but built with Python using WSGI technologies.
There wasn’t yet an actual release so I took a snapshot from their mercurial repository and built an egged release from it. Since this wasn’t immediately straight forward I’ve decided to package up what I’ve done and describe it here.
With the new packages I’ve setup, setting up a TextPress instance is quite easy (but please be warned that this is pre-alpha software not yet released by the maintainers).
Here are the steps to get started assuming a unix shell like bash.
Start by creating an isolated environment using something like virtualenv. I won’t bore you with instructions on setting up virtualenv here.
$ python virtualenv.py textpress-app $ source textpress-app/bin/activate (textpress-app)$Next step is to install the pre-packaged TextPress provided by me.
(textpress-app)$ easy_install -i http://dist.serverzen.com/textpress/latest/simple/ TextPress
Python2.4 users (Python2.5 users skip this step) will additionally need to install wsgiref and pysqlite:
(textpress-app)$ easy_install wsgiref (textpress-app)$ easy_install pysqlite
Now that the software is installed, lets setup a place to hold our actual blog instances.
(textpress-app)$ mkdir blog-instances (textpress-app)$ cd blog-instancesAnd now lets run our first blog instance.
(textpress-app)$ mkdir myblog (textpress-app)$ TEXTPRESS_INSTANCE=myblog textpress-manage runserverAfter the server has been successfully started, use the web browser to configure the first blog instance by following the step-by-step wizard.
- choose your language (english for purposes of this discussion), “next”
- specify “sqlite:///database.db” as Database to store all data in the file “database.db” relative to the myblog directory, “next”
- fill in first user information (username, password, email) “next”
- and finally “install”
Your new test blog should be up and running. Check out the TextPress wiki for more information on how to use TextPress. But those familiar with WordPress should feel at home.
Update: The fact that this is pre-alpha software means that newer updates and releases might not migrate your data properly so some manual massaging may be necessary.