django-articles is a powerful, pluggable blogging application for
Django-powered sites. It's also what powers http://www.codekoala.com/ and a
handful of other awesome sites.
Features
- Tags for articles, with a tag cloud template tag
- Auto-completion for tags in the Django admin
- Auto-tagging: assigning existing tags to articles when they're present in the
article content
- Ability to post in the future
- Article expiration facilities
- Articles from email
- Article attachments
- Article statuses--"draft" and "finished" are there by default
- Allows articles to be written in plain text/HTML or using Markdown,
ReStructured Text, or Textile markup
- Related articles
- Follow-up articles
- Comments by Disqus
- Article archive, with pagination
- Internationalization-ready
- Detects links in articles and creates a per-article index for you
- Word count
- RSS feeds for the latest articles
- RSS feeds for the latest articles by tag
- South migrations
Requirements
django-articles
wants a modern version of Django--something after 1.1. It
used to rely on django.contrib.comments
for commenting needs, but I
recently switched to Disqus <http://www.disqus.com/>
_. Included herein is a
management command to convert django.contrib.comments
comments to Disqus.
This project also expects django.contrib.sites
, django.contrib.admin
,
django.contrib.markup
, django.contrib.auth
,
django.contrib.humanize
, and django.contrib.syndication
to be properly
installed.
If you plan to use the schema migrations, you'll need to install South <http://south.aeracode.org/>
_.
.. note:: New in 2.1.0
Installation
Download django-articles
using one of the following methods:
Checkout from Mercurial
Use one of the following commands::
hg clone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles/
hg clone http://django-articles.googlecode.com/hg/ django-articles
Checkout from GitHub
Use the following command::
git clone http://github.com/codekoala/django-articles.git
The CheeseShop
Use one of the following commands::
pip install django-articles
easy_install django-articles
Configuration
First of all, you must add this project to your list of INSTALLED_APPS
in
settings.py
::
INSTALLED_APPS = (
'django.contrib.admin',
'django.contrib.auth',
'django.contrib.contenttypes',
'django.contrib.humanize',
'django.contrib.markup',
'django.contrib.sessions',
'django.contrib.sites',
'django.contrib.syndication',
...
'articles',
'south',
...
)
Run python manage.py syncdb
. This creates a few tables in your database
that are necessary for operation. If you choose to use South, you'll probably
need to run python manage.py migrate articles
instead.
Next, set a couple of settings in your settings.py
:
DISQUS_USER_API_KEY
: Your user API key from Disqus. This is free, and
you can learn how to get it from Disqus's API Page <http://2ze.us/ME>
_ or
you can try http://disqus.com/api/get_my_key/ when you're logged into Disqus.
You only need this one if you're going to be converting comments from
django.contrib.comments
to Disqus.DISQUS_FORUM_SHORTNAME
: The name of your Disqus site. This is what's
used to link comments to your site.
Less frequently changed settings:
ARTICLES_TEASER_LIMIT
: The number of words to display in the teaser.
Defaults to 75
.ARTICLES_AUTO_TAG
: Whether or not to automatically tag articles. Defaults
to True
.ARTICLES_DEFAULT_DB
: Database in which to store articles. Defaults to
default
.ARTICLES_LOOKUP_LINK_TITLE
: Whether to fetch the title of remote links or
use the local name of the link. Defaults to True
.
Also, make sure that you have the following context processors in your
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS
tuple:
django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth
django.core.context_processors.i18n
django.core.context_processors.media
django.core.context_processors.request
.. note:: New in 2.1.2
If you want to specify the default database to use for django-articles
, you
can specify the ARTICLES_DEFAULT_DB
setting. This defaults to default
.
Template Integration
There are several template blocks that django-articles
expects your
base.html
file to contain:
title
meta-keywords
meta-description
extra-head
content
footer
Tag Auto-Completion
If you would like to take advantage of the auto-completion feature for tags,
copy the files from the articles/media
directories into your static media
directory. django-articles
expects to find each of those directories/files
in your settings.MEDIA_URL
directory--if this does not suit your needs, you
may override the Media
class of articles.forms.ArticleAdminForm
with
the appropriate paths.
Another assumption that is made by this feature is that the prefix you assign
to your django-articles
installation in your ROOT_URLCONF
will be
^blog/
. For example::
url(r'^blog', include('articles.urls')),
If this does not match your installation, all you need to change is the
js/tag_autocomplete.js
to reflect the proper path.
When that's done, you should be able to begin using django-articles
!
Articles From Email
.. note:: New in 1.9.2
.. admonition:: Version Dependencies
The articles from email feature requires Python 2.4 or greater.
I've been working on making it possible for django-articles
to post
articles that you email to a special mailbox. This seems to be working on the
most basic levels right now. It's not been tested in very many scenarios, and
I would appreciate it if you could post problems with it in the ticket tracker
at http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles/ so we can make it work
really well.
Things to keep in mind:
-
Any active user who is a django.contrib.auth.models.User
and has an
email address associated with their user information is a valid sender for
articles from email. This is how the author of an article is determined.
-
Only the following fields are currently populated by the articles from email
feature:
- author
- title
- slug (uniqueness is handled)
- content
- markup
- publish_date
- is_active
Any and all other attributes about an article must be configured later on
using the standard mechanisms (aka the Django admin).
-
There is a new management command to handle all of the magic for this
feature: check_for_articles_from_email
. This command is intended to be
called either manually or via external scheduling utilities (like cron
)
-
Email messages are deleted after they are turned into articles. This
means that you should probably have a special mailbox dedicated to
django-articles and articles from email. However, only emails whose sender
matches the email address of an active user are deleted (as described above).
-
Attachments are currently not bothered with. Don't worry, they will be in
the future. :D
Configuration
There are several new variables that you can configure in your settings.py
to enable articles from email, specifying a ARTICLES_FROM_EMAIL
dictionary:
-
protocol
- Either IMAP4
or POP3
. Default: IMAP4
-
host
- The mail server. Example: mail.yourserver.com
-
port
- The port to use to connect to your mail server
-
keyfile
- The keyfile used to access your mail server. This is only used
if ssl
is True
, and even then it's optional. untested
-
certfile
- The certfile used to access your mail server. This is only
used if ssl
is True
, and even then it's optional. untested
-
user
- The username used to access your mailbox
-
password
- The password associated with the user to access your mailbox
-
ssl
- Whether or not to connect to the mail server using SSL. Default:
False
-
autopost
- Whether or not to automatically post articles that are created
from email messages. If this is False
, the articles will be marked as
inactive and you must manually make them active. Default: False
-
markup
- The default markup language to use for articles from email.
Options include:
h
for HTML/plain textm
for Markdownr
for reStructuredTextt
for Textile
Default: h
-
acknowledge
- Whether or not to email out an acknowledgment
message when articles are created from email. Default: False
Example configuration::
ARTICLES_FROM_EMAIL = {
'protocol': 'IMAP4',
'host': 'mail.yourserver.com',
'port': 9000,
'keyfile': '/path/to/keyfile',
'certfile': '/path/to/certfile',
'user': 'your_username',
'password': 'your_password',
'ssl': True,
'autopost': True,
'markup': 'r',
'acknowledge': True,
}
Article Attachments
.. note:: New in 1.9.6
You can now attach files to your articles and have them be included with the
article on the site. Attachments can be created using the Django admin while
composing your articles. You may also attach files to emails that you send to
the special mailbox (described above) if you so desire.
Article Statuses
.. note:: New in 1.9.6
As of 1.9.6
, you may specify the state of an article when you save it.
This allows you to begin composing an article, save it, and come back later to
finish it. In the past, this behavior was handled by not setting a publish
date for the article. However, saving an unfinished article with a non-live
status allows superusers to view the article on the site as though it were
live. In the future, I plan to allow authors to view non-live versions of
their articles.
The default status for an article will always be the Article Status object with
the lowest ordering
value. This includes negative integers. If you want
all articles to be Finished
by default, go ahead and update the
ordering
on that object to be less than the ordering
value for the
Draft
object (and/or any others you create).
Auto-Tagging
.. note:: New in 2.1.0
The auto-tagging feature allows you to easily apply any of your current tags to
your articles. When you save an Article object with auto-tagging enabled for
that article, django-articles
will go through each of your existing tags to
see if the entire word appears anywhere in your article's content. If a match
is found, that tag will be added to the article.
For example, if you have tags test
and art
, and you wrote a new
auto-tagged Article with the text::
This is a test article.
django-articles
would automatically apply the test
tag to this article,
but not the art
tag. It will only apply the art
tag automatically when
the actual word "art" appears in the content.
Auto-tagging does not remove any tags that are already assigned to an article.
This means that you can still add tags the good, old-fashioned way in the
Django Admin without losing them. Auto-tagging will only add to an article's
existing tags (if needed).
Auto-tagging is enabled for all articles by default. If you want to disable it
by default (and enable it on a per-article basis), set ARTICLES_AUTO_TAG
to
False
in your settings.py
file.
Auto-Tagging does not attempt to produce any keywords that magically
represent the content of your articles. Only existing tags are used!!
Help & Contributing
Good luck! Please contact me with any questions or concerns you have with the
project! If you're interested in reporting a bug or feature request, the
official ticket tracker is at http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles/