Douglas is a file-based blog system written in Python with the following features:

• static renderer
• WSGI application
• plugin system for easy adjustment of transforms
• Jinja renderer

Douglas is based on Pyblosxom.

• Python 2.7
• possibly other requirements depending on what plugins you install

1. Create a virtual environment
2. Activate the virtual environment

3. Install Douglas into your virtual environment:

   pip install https://github.com/willkg/douglas.zip#egg=douglas

4. Create a new blog structure:

   douglas-cmd create <blog-dir>

   For example: douglas-cmd create mynewblog

5. Edit the mynewblog/config.py file. There should be instructions on what should get changed and how to change it.

6. From mynewblog, render the site:

   douglas-cmd staticrender

7. Copy the files from the compiled/ dir to where they're available for serving by your web server.

Each file in mynewblog/entries/ is a blog entry. They are text files. You can edit them with your favorite text editor.

The blog is rendered using templates in themynewblog/themes/ directory. A flavour consists of at least content_type, head, story and foot templates. You can have date_head and date_foot as well.

The following plugins are used by default:

draft_folder

Creates a draft folder that you can view on the web-site, but doesn't show up in the archive links. This makes it easier for other people to review entries before they're live.

The draft dir is mynewblog/drafts/.

When you want to make an entry live, you move it from mynewblog/drafts/ to mynewblog/entries/.

published_date

Add #pyblished YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM to your file metadata and that's the published date for the blog entry rather than the mtime of the file.

Entries, categories, storage:

• Douglas stores everything as files on the file system---there is no database.
• Each blog entry is a file.
• Blog entry files are stored in a directory hierarchy in your datadir.
• Each subdirectory in your datadir corresponds to a category of your blog.

Themes:

• A theme consists of a set of Jinja templates. It's an output format.
• Themes are stored in a directory called the themedir.
• Douglas comes with two themes: html, rss.
• There's more information on themes and templates in the Themes and Templates chapter of the manual (docs/themes_and_templates.rst if you're looking at the source).

Plugins:

• Douglas has a plugin system.
• Plugins are written in Python.
• Plugins are loaded using the plugin_dirs and load_plugins configuration variables.
• For more information on using plugins, see Plugins in the manual (docs/plugins.rst if you're looking at the source).
• For more information on writing plugins see Writing Plugins (docs/dev_writing_plugins.rst if you're looking at the source).