Recent versions of wordpress make that easy, but still I see many blogs being plagued by spam or simply hacked.

But it’s true that using a ready made blog engine, makes you focus on the content (until you play with too many plugins). I developed my own blogging engine (plus other stuff around it) using Ruby on Rails, but sometimes a stupid bug can crash my whole website.

Cheers!

We really don’t see anything other blogging/CMS app outdoing WordPress now that it’s at ver 2.8.4. Even the big boys are WordPressing too.

Cheers!
Charlie Claw’s

To this end, I desire a blog that supports a proper title, author, abstract, body (including structured sections), footnotes, and a proper bibliography.

Can your blog software do this?

Didn’t think so.

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“I’m not necessarily convinced that there’s a great need for a “standard” Django blog application; it would appease some folks, but I have a feeling that in the Django world a lot of people really would be happier, in the long run, writing their own app that does what they need…”

“It’s easy to write a “basic” blog in Django. If that’s all people want, then great. Something like that will work perfectly for the majority of bloggers (who probably won’t get that much readership anyway)…

But all this talk about making a “full-featured” blog app in Django — one that will really get noticed (and thus get django noticed): what we need is a blog with *more features* that could actually begin to compete with something like WordPress**.

I mean stuff like Akismet, Flickr integration, delicious/magnolia bookmarks, multi-author (with per-object permissions), importing from WordPress, statistics, easy web-based installation (NOT easy_install but a wizard someone could follow, like the WordPress install, lots of
customization, integration with pingback services, etc…..

If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. To even be a blip on the screen it will need this kind of stuff. I also doubt the django-admin will be sufficient for an application like this…”

“All I tried to say is perhaps that people who are looking for a simple to use blogging solution might want to get there with the least amount of work. Installing WordPress is damn easy. Everybody with “computer knowledge” therefore typically recommends WordPress (let’s not dive into the discussion here that PHP is nearly always preinstalled and Python not).”

—-

I won’t argue that nobody is interested in this, because someone’s always interesting in something. But I don’t see a groundswell of demand for a standard blogging app. If you do, please post some links or information about it.

Among the existing Django blogging applications out there, the best-known one is probably Blogmaker. I’ve never used it. The documentation claims it’s full-featured and production-quality. If it emerges as the de jure or de facto standard, it might change the blogging landscape. If that happens, more power to it!

But your comment touched on two other issues that speak to how much development will be needed on projects such as Blogmaker.

Today, it’s easy to deploy existing open-source blogging applications along with Django. Most blogs want to live at an URL like http://www.domain.com/blog/, and that’s easy to do with apache redirects. It’s what TrenchMice does. TrenchMice is 100% Django, with a WordPress blog.

“Easy” is a fuzzy term. It wasn’t “easy as pie” to set up, but it wasn’t hard either. I can’t compare its ease of installation with the ease of installation of a nonexistent Django blogging competitor. My point is that “top-notch blog functionality” can be deployed in Django applications today.

Which leads me my second point, which is that existing open-source blogging services/products have tons of features. In order to compete with, say, WordPress, you’re talking about a lot of development. In technical terms, a “shitload.”

I’m not saying it can’t be done, but the “top-notch blog functionality” bar is very high. And the existing blogging products won’t be standing still while this development occurs. BTW, WordPress is open-source, you have just as much (I would argue far more, if you count themes) development activity in it than you would have on a Django blogging platform.

And after all that development, we’ll have…a blogging engine. Gee, just like we have today.

Thanks for writing!

But I see a lot of interest in standardized support for top-notch blog functionality for deploying alone or with other django apps.

And I’ll go further to say that there is also interest in building a CMS on top of django, with all the sorts of theming, plug-and-play css options, etc. that wordpress or plone already offer. But done right, and securely, in python on django, for deployment by non-programmers.

I’ve heard over and over that many in the django community don’t want that as their focus. Fine! But django-the-framework is still a great building-block for a great CMS, IMHO.

So again – if getting a blog up is what you want – yes, there are many options. But if folks want to help django be a player in the blogging world, an important area of web interactivity, then by all means lets collaborate on getting some first-class software and designs out there.