Motor-Blog

Blog platform based on Tornado, MongoDB, and Motor. To be used with MarsEdit.

Prequisites

• MongoDB
• Python 2.7
• Tornado
• Motor, my experimental asynchronous MongoDB driver for Tornado
• Greenlet
• Other packages in motor_blog.reqs

Features

• Frontend: Motor-Blog runs in Tornado. It is very fast.

• Editing: Motor-Blog has no admin panel, but supports MarsEdit.

• Comments: Motor-Blog does not support comments natively, I recommend a third-party Javascript comments API like Disqus.

• Customization: Appearance is completely customizable.

Installation

• Install MongoDB and run it on the default port on the same machine as Motor-Blog

• pip install -r motor_blog.reqs

• To migrate from a prior WordPress blog with migrate_from_wordpress.py you'll need Pandoc

Deployment

Development Deployment

Start MongoDB

mkdir data
mongod --dbpath data --logpath data/mongod.log --fork

Set your PYTHONPATH to include PyMongo and Motor:

export PYTHONPATH=/path/to/mongo-python-driver

Copy motor_blog.conf.example to motor_blog.conf, edit it as desired. Start the application:

python server.py --debug

Visit http://localhost:8888/

Production Deployment

I run Motor-Blog on http://emptysquare.net/blog with Nginx at the front and four server.py processes. Those processes and MongoDB are managed by Supervisor. I've provided example config files in this repository in etc/.

MarsEdit setup

In MarsEdit, do "File -> New Blog." Give it a name and the URL of your Motor-Blog's home page. MarsEdit auto-detects the rest. You'll need to enter the username and password you put in motor_blog.conf. In the "General" tab of your blog's settings, I suggest setting "Download the 1000 most recent posts on refresh," since Motor-Blog can handle it. Under "Editing," set Preview Text Filter to "Markdown."

Blogging

Motor-Blog supports the same Markdown dialect as cMarkdown with its flags set to the defaults. Plain inline code is surrounded by backticks (``). Syntax-highlighted code is indented with four spaces, and the first line is like:

    ::: lang="py" highlight="4,5,6"

... to specify the language syntax and which lines to highlight in yellow. The list of languages is whatever Pygments supports, including the following of interest to Python coders like me: py, py3, pytb and py3tb for tracebacks, and pycon for console sessions.

Customization

• Set your theme directory in motor_blog.conf.
• The theme directory should contain a templates subdir with the same set of filenames as the example theme.
• Follow the example theme for inspiration.
• The setting() function is available to all templates, and gives access to values in motor_blog.conf.

A Tour of the Code

• server.py: Web application server
• motor_blog/: Package code
  • web/
    • handlers.py: RequestHandlers for the blog's website
    • admin-templates/: Templates for login/out and viewing drafts
  • theme/: Default theme for emptysquare.net, overridable with your theme
  • api/: The XML-RPC API that MarsEdit uses
  • models.py: schema definitions
  • text/
    • markup.py: convert from Markdown into HTML for display, including some custom syntax
    • wordpress_to_markdown.py: convert from the WordPress's particular HTML to markdown, for migrate_from_wordpress.py
    • abbrev.py: convert from HTML to truncated plain text for all-posts page
  • tools/:
    • migrate_from_wordpress.py: Tool for migrating from my old Wordpress blog to Motor-Blog
  • cache.py: Cache results from MongoDB, invalidate when events are emitted
  • indexes.py: Index definitions for server.py --ensure_indexes
  • options.py: Configuration parsing