Lithium blog app

Lithium blog is a simple blog application which allows multi domain, multi user blogs.

Note

Lithium blog default templates require the 'django.contrib.comments' application. But, if you write some custom templates you can work around this dependency.

Quick start guide

To get started using the blog app, follow these steps:

1. Install the blog app by adding 'lithium.blog' to INSTALLED_APPS.

2. Run manage.py syncdb so that Django will create the post tables.

3. Add the blog app’s URLs to your project’s urls.py:

   urlpatterns = patterns('',
           ...
           url(r'^blog/', include('lithium.blog.urls')),
           ...
   )
   

Template tags

Template tags are used within your blog’s Templates to customize your blog, with the following templatetags you dynamically display posts or categories.

Like all custom template tag libraries, you’ll need to load the custom tags before you can use them:

{% load blog %}

Once loaded you can use the template tags below.

Get latest posts

This template tag will grab a list of the latest posts and insert them into the template context defined after the ‘as’ clause. Optionally, you can pass two other variables, a user, and a limit. The user clause will only display posts where the author is that user. The limit will limit the amount of posts in the list (the default is 5).

Syntax:

{% get_latest_posts as [varname] %}
{% get_latest_posts as [varname] limit [limit] %}
{% get_latest_posts for [user] as [varname] %}
{% get_latest_posts for [user] as [varname] limit [limit] %}

Example usage:

{% get_latest_posts as post_list limit 7 %}
{% for post in post_list %}
    {{ post.title }}
{% endfor %}

Get category list

To get a list of categories you can use the get_category_list template tag. This tag will return a list of categories in alphabetical order. It will also filter the categories and only use categories where “favorite” is set. Like get_latest_posts, this tag also has a optional limit clause, except the default is 10.

Syntax:

{% get_category_list as [varname] %}
{% get_category_list as [varname] limit [limit] %}

Example usage:

{% get_category_list as category_list  %}
{% for category in category_list %}
    {{ post.tite }}
{% endfor %}

Settings

Some of the application’s behavior can be configured by adding the appropriate settings to your project’s settings file.

BLOG_PAGINATE_BY

Default: 10

This is the amount of posts per page on any post list pages, such as the main post archive, tag post archive etc.

BLOG_PING

Default: False

When a post is created, if this is set to True, a post will be pinged to the servers in BLOG_PING_SERVERS.

BLOG_PING_SERVERS

Default:

BLOG_PING_SERVERS = (
    'http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2',
    'http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping',
    'http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping',
    'http://ping.feedburner.com',
)

This is a tuple of servers to be pinged.

BLOG_FEED_ITEMS

Default: 20

This is the amount of posts to display in the RSS Feeds for the blog.

Templates

There are two templates which are used, these are blog/post_list.html and blog/post_detail.html.

blog/post_list.html

This template will get passed:

• post_list: The list of posts, this can be iterated over to display each Post within.
• is_paginated: A boolean representing whether the results are paginated. Specifically, this is set to False if the number of available posts is less than or equal to paginate_by.

If the results are paginated, the context will contain these extra variables:

• paginator: An instance of django.core.paginator.Paginator.
• page_obj: An instance of django.core.paginator.Page.

blog/post_detail.html

This template will get passed a post in the template context post.