Lazy Crazy Coder's blog

Quick review of 20 Django blogs.

Published at 27, September 2008, author art. Tags: blog, django, python, reusable, review

I wrote my own blog engine in Django. How about you? There are many opensource django application which implement different features. For example, my own blog engine "firefly" (which is used at http://svetlyak.ru) has support for text post and also it has builtin photo blog with separate feed, urls and tagging. Also, it includes meny other features, but I don't think, that all these features will be useful even for 10% of readers.

Today, I decide to look at existing opensource django blogs with hope to find a universal solution, simple but flexible enough to build a blog with any kind of the media. I need a reusable django application to build a blog with support for posts with links, text, images, whatever.

So, lets look, what you can find at http://code.google.com/hosting/ and http://github.com using keywords "django blog":

banjo -- very complex "all-in-one" solution, with many models and custom plugins. This is absolutelly not "Django Way".
becca -- minimalistic blog application. There is only two models -- for post and for tags. Pretty code, but to be updated to work with django 1.0.
blogango -- relatively simple design, but with custom tags and comments.
blogmaker -- has more or less complex design with built-in trackback and tags support.
coltrane-blog -- simple blog by James Bennett with two separate models for posts and links. Uses custom categorization and django-tagging.
django-basic-blog -- really simple blog application, some where similar to coltrane -- basic-blog also uses separate categories and django-tagging.
django_blog -- very, very, very minimalistic blog application.
django-blog-entries -- interesting models design. This blog uses comment_utils for moderation.
django-diario -- also has very interesting models.py. I've learn some new things about usage of django's fields. This blogging application has relatively simple and has _optional_ support for django-tagging. Also, django-diario has _multi-site support_ and one post can be published on different sites. I don't like it complexity in multi-site part, but other ideas are look good.
django-ink -- very simple and clean models. Nothing exeptional, just easy to use blog application.
django-yab -- yab is nothing but yet another django blog. However, it has support for multiple blogs, which may be interesting to somebody, not for me, certanly.
flother -- besides a simple and straigt blog application, "flother" includes a photo gallery application. In that way, "flother" very similar to my "firefly" engine, which also includes a blog for text and a separate photoblog.
lifeflow -- another "all-in-one" solution. Complex, with custom comments, categories, tags, translation support, uploads and other strange post's grouping tools. LifeFlow is huge and ugly for my taste.
n00bish-django-blog -- really noobish app, very simple and useless :-)
oebfare -- simple blog, which includes few application to publish posts and links. Nothing interesting.
shiftingbits -- based on the "oebfare", straightforward blog, with additional support for import from Wordpress, metaWeblog API, Akismet, django.contrib.comments and comment_utils.moderation.
zangetsu -- pretty simple blog application with custom tags and example of TinyMCE, embedded into a django admin. Also, it has import from the wordpress and from a plain rss feed.
zsite -- the most minimalistic blog. It has just a settings.py, manage.py and urls.py. Zsite includes basic.blog and basic.inlines from a django-basic-apps.
byteflow -- is a very complex, full-fleged blog engine, based on separate applications. I don't need all this stuff, but sometimes it is very interesting to look "under the hood" of the byteflow and discover something interesting.
firefly -- my own blog. Complex and with tight coupling between application. I want to separate them from each other, but sometimes it is to difficult. Has support for multiple languages, pingbacks, tagging (with modified multilingual django-tagging application), akismet moderation, photo blogging, pinging of blog search engines and etc..

As you can see, there are many solutions, but I am not found any application which comply with my requirements. So, I need to continue my investigations of the Django world…

Lazy Crazy Coder's blog

Quick review of 20 Django blogs.

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