It's been a long while since I last updated my old page. Reason was that it was cumbersome even to change small things, since it did not feature a web interface, but required me to login via SSH.

All in all, it was a technically cool solution but rather impractical from a user's point of view. Now, since Django, the Python Web Framework, is getting so much attention recently, I gave it a try at redesigning my old page. In fact, I didn't just want to redesign, but extend it with a blog application.

I started diving into Django without having any idea of Python at all (I do however have several years of experience in PHP and Perl/mod_perl and other MVC web frameworks).

How it is done

Django installation and configuration is pretty well-covered on the Django project site and I won't repeat it here again. I'll assume you've successfully installed Django and created your own project.

My page has a number of sections (top navigation bar), which are all based on Django's internal django.contrib.flatpages. The blog section, on the other hand, is a custom application. All it needs is the following model:

from django.db import models

class Tag(models.Model):
	slug = models.SlugField(prepopulate_from=('title',))
	title = models.CharField(maxlength=30)
	description = models.TextField(help_text='Short summary of this tag')
	
	def __str__(self):
		return self.title
	
	def get_absolute_url(self):
		return "/blog/tag/%s/" % self.slug
	
	class Admin:
		list_display = ('slug', 'title',)
		search_fields = ('title', 'description',)
	
	class Meta:
		ordering = ('title',)

class Post(models.Model):
	slug = models.SlugField(prepopulate_from=('title',), help_text='Automatically built from the title.'
	)
	assoc_tags = models.ManyToManyField(Tag)
	title = models.CharField(maxlength=80)
	date = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
	body = models.TextField()
	image = models.ImageField(
		'Attach Image',
		upload_to='blog',
		blank=True
	)
	def __str__(self):
		return self.title
	
	def get_absolute_url(self):
		return "/blog/%s/%s/" % (self.date.strftime("%Y/%b/%d").lower(), self.slug)
	
	class Admin:
		list_display = ('slug', 'title', 'date',)
		search_fields = ('title', 'body',)
		date_hierarchy = 'date'
	
	class Meta:
		get_latest_by = 'date'
		ordering = ('-date',)

To display the tag list on the right of this page, I used a simple template tag like this:

from django import template
from tsonny.blog.models import Tag

class TagListNode(template.Node):
	def __init__(self, varname):
		self.varname = varname

	def render(self, context):
		context[self.varname] = Tag.objects.all()
		return ''

def do_get_tag_list(parser, token):
    """
    {% get_tag_list as tag_list %}
    """
    bits = token.contents.split()
    if len(bits) != 3:
        raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, "'%s' tag takes two arguments" % bits[0]
    if bits[1] != "as":
        raise template.TemplateSyntaxError, "First argument to '%s' tag must be 'as'" % bits[0]
    return TagListNode(bits[2])

register = template.Library()
register.tag('get_tag_list', do_get_tag_list)

To include the "latest news" from other website's RSS feeds, I simply took the aggregator code from djangoproject.com (it's in the Trac repository) and modified it a bit.

To make life easier, the interested reader may also want to download the complete code, ready to use (but without templates, of course).