refried.org

Yesterday I attended a TCZPUG meeting. That's the Twin Cities Zope and Python Users Group for those who don't recognize the acronym [*]. It's a small group that hasn't met very frequently. It's also very Zope centric. Most people in the group use Zope and Plone. I get the feeling that few people in the group actually dig into Python all that much.

This meeting was just an excuse to meet up with other members and work on our pet projects. While I was there I dug a little into the newforms-admin branch of Django. I have some ideas about how I would like to make the admin more extendable. I'd like to make applications the focus more than models. To do that I want to make it really easy to hook in new admin views that are more workflow centric than model centric.

I also gave an ad-hoc presentation on Django. It certainly wasn't a professional or practiced presentation. I highlighted models, urlconf, views and templates. But as I talked about Django I got the sense that I was the only person there that really likes to write Python code. Zope and Plone are really through-the-web platforms where Django forces you to write Python code.

One of the benefits of moving away from a pure Zope site is that it's really easy to integrate other apps. Tonight I added ViewVC and Subversion, two ways to look at my source code. The first is good for browsing my source code, the second allows you to check out your own copy. There isn't a whole lot there at the moment. I was tracking COREBlog development for a while and I have some changes in there. There is a TiVo project I started, but didn't get far on. And finally there is the source code for the new web site.

I worked more on converting the site from Zope to Django this weekend. I have recent comments working. I have RSS working. I have the archives working. I have comments working. I still need to work on the look of the comment form and automatically munge the image URLs when I migrate. I'm very happy with the way it's going. Hopefully in the next week I'll make the switch. There's a prediction that will come back to haunt me...

My experimentation with Django has gone really well. I created a simple blog application with a structure similar to COREBlog. I am able to import all of my COREBlog entries and comments. I really want to convert my Zope and COREBlog site over to Apache and Django. I have a few small things to get done and one looming problem.

• Add a comment form and display comments
• Make the site look good
• Figure out how to migrate and handle images

That last bullet is causing me some trouble. In COREBlog I was using Zope's acquisition to find images and all links to images where relative. I am able to pull all of the images out of the ZODB and I created an Attachment model to associate the images to the entries. It worked great when you viewed the entries in detail but using relative URLs cause the images to not show up when viewing a list of entries.

I guess I need to do some research on how other weblog software handles images. I want it really easy to add images to entries. I may need to adjust my position that images are directly attached to the entries.

There has been a lot of talk in the Python world about web frameworks lately. The recent chatter started around a post by Guido van Rossum asking which web framework would work best for his starter project at Google. I didn't follow the thread, but I've seen some discussion on the Zope3-users mailling list and blogs syndicated at PlanetZope.org. Django was mentioned several times and I decided to take a look. I haven't been all that happy with Zope and COREBlog lately and I'm looking to make a move. I might just make a move to Django.

I'm working through the tutorials and I'm noticing a lot of things about Django that I like:

1. It runs in mod_python on Apache, which will make integrating other web apps a lot easier.
2. It puts great emphasis on making URLs look clean. Zope 3 seems to be taking the exact opposite direction.
3. It makes administrative interfaces for you.
4. The template language is way simpler than ZPT.

Since web development isn't my day job I really don't want to spend a lot of time learning a framework. Django looks like a better solution for me than Zope.

Now the question is, will I get anything done?

Okay, I've done a bunch of research on weblog software. I still don't know what I'm going to use next. After looking at Pyblosxom for a while, I'm realizing how much Zope brings to the table. I'm tempted to try bringing the Pyblosxom design into Zope 3.

I've also seen a lot of discussion about the Blogger and metaBlogger APIs. It seems that lots of server side blog software is concerned about supporting it. I'm having a lot of trouble finding client software that supports it. It would be great to hand Heather an easy to use Windows program instead of writing a web interface. Does anyone use client side software to publish to their blogs?

I have this driving feeling that I should switch to a different weblog software. I'm currenly using COREBlog which sits on top of Zope and is written in Python. At the time I chose it I was totally fascinated by the Z Object Programming Environment and had to use it. COREBlog looked like the most promising Zope weblog to hack on and it was really easy to get working. After looking at the COREBlog code for a while, I'm really unhappy with the quality of the code. Since I don't do anything Zope, or even web, for work I never really got into programming under Zope.

Recently I've been tracking Quills development. It's another Zope weblog built on top of Plone. I tried it out and I'm able to migrate my weblog to that, but I still don't feel like it's the right solution. The Zope world is starting a large transition from Zope 2 to Zope 3. Zope 3 looks promising, but not much is usable there and I don't want to write something from scratch.

I think I want to stay with a Python-based solution, but I'll probably drop Zope. I like writing entries in reStructured Text so I want to keep that. I also like the layout of COREBlog, but I know the colors suck. I also need support for multiple posters and a through the web management interface. I don't think Heather will appreciate a command line interface. I would like to avoid something that depends on MySQL or PostgreSQL since I don't want to be a database administrator. It also has to be free as in speech and beer and runs on Linux. I also need a migration path from COREBlog.

Suggestions are welcome.

Today COREBlog 1.2 was released. I merged it into my local Subversion repository. The changes included a semi Plone friendly skin. Some files got quite a few revisions so I decided to look around the web to see if the author has his CVS tree available. I wasn't able to find it but I did find a tree on Sourceforge Japan and Atsushi Shibata's blog. It seems that not only is the author Japanese, COREBlog is really popular in Japan. Unfortunately I can't read a wink of Japanese.

I ran across an example of a good looking Coreblog today while searching for updates to the image management patches to Coreblog. I can see that other people like Coreblog a lot and are actively hacking on it. Unfortnately I haven't been able to find patches posted anywhere. I see that a bug was filed and resolved to add some nice image management, but I don't have that capability in Coreblog 1.11. Perhaps some of these developers could send me some patches.