Collective is a project mainly written in JAVASCRIPT and PYTHON, it's free.
collective: blog engine with minimal core feature set
Written by Vic Fryzel
collective is a blog engine with a small core feature set. It is intended to be used with other hosted services by embedding them into articles. By itself, collective is able to manage articles and static pages, but has no support for comments, file uploads, etc. It also doesn't have a GUI-based installer, and requires a command-line installation process.
Out of the box, collective has support for:
Out of the box, collective does not support:
To use this blog software, you should probably be at least a bit technical, and have some experience deploying web applications on a web server. If you are not familiar with programming at all, then you may want to try a hosted blog engine, like Posterous, Tumblr, Blogger, etc.
You must have the following dependencies installed and available on the PYTHONPATH of your server. Your startup script must also know where these are.
You'll also need a web server capable of running a Django (Python) application behind a web server. Examples include Apache 2 with FastCGI or Passenger. This can be a bit difficult in a shared hosting environment, but this application is known to work on DreamHost.
To get going, you must create a database and edit three files. Once you've done this, collective should work. Expected configuration and deployment time is about two hours, depending on how familiar you are with configuring a Django application.
All fields you should edit are marked EDIT_ME. To find everything you should edit to get going, run:
grep -R EDIT_ME ./*The type of database you use is up to you. This blog engine supports all databases that are supported natively in Django, as listed here.
Copy settings.py.template to settings.py.
cp settings.py.template settings.pyIn settings.py, edit the DATABASES, SECRET_KEY, TEMPLATE_DIRS, CACHE_BACKEND, and CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_KEY_PREFIX variables. For help, see the documentation.
Copy feeds.py.template to feeds.py.
cp feeds.py.template feeds.pyIn feeds.py, you must edit the various options to configure your feeds to your liking.
Copy themes/minimalbw to themes/minimalbw-yourname.
cp -R themes/minimalbw themes/minimalbw-yournameIn themes/minimalbw-yourname/base.html, you'll need to configure that base HTML template so that it reflects your blog. This includes things like page title, Disqus keys, etc.
Speaking of Disqus, make sure you register a Disqus account, and use the appropriate unique identifiers when editing base.html.
You must first create your database schema.
python manage.py syncdbWhen prompted, be sure to create an admin user.
To deploy this application locally (e.g. while developing a theme,) just run
python manage.py runserverThis is documented here. You may have to edit settings.py appropriately to enable development settings.
To deploy this application to a Passenger instance, place a link to contrib/passenger_wsgi.py in the appropriate location on your web server. This will vary from server to server. To do this, you must first copy the script template, and then edit its settings so that the paths match your setup.
cp contrib/passenger_wsgi.py.template contrib/passenger_wsgi.py
# Edit contrib/passenger_wsgi.py
ln -s /path/to/collective/contrib/passenger_wsgi.py /path/to/passenger/scripts/passenger_wsgi.pyTo deploy this application with Apache 2 and mod_python, see here.
Also, setup your web server to serve themes/minimalbw/static/ in a public directory. You can do this by creating a symlink to that directory in your public directory on your web server.
Besides the static directory, you will also need to copy relevant admin media to the directory that is configured for admin media in your settings.py. This is documented here.
The static directory also contains a .htaccess file that will enable useful caching operations on an Apache 2 web server.
You are more or less on your own here at this time. You can look at the database schema, and import from your existing data source accordingly. Obviously this will require a bit of work on your part.
After deploying collective, you should have an empty blank page. To add articles or static pages, login to http://yourdomain.com/admin with the username and password created previously, and add an Article.
Articles should be written in Markdown with optional raw HTML for the cases in which Markdown does not have an appropriate syntax.
Based on the value of CACHE_MIDDLEWARE_SECONDS in your settings.py, pages will be cached until the cache clears. This is important to note, because if you edit an article or flatpage, you will not see the updates reflected until you either clear your cache or the given number of seconds has elapsed.
After collective is deployed, you must also add search support via Google Custom Search. To do this, create a new flatpage, and add the embed code that Google Custom Search gives you after creating a custom search engine. The flatpage must have the URI /search/.
Everything you need to create your own theme is in the themes/ directory. You could get going with a new theme pretty quickly just by copying themes/minimalbw to themes/mytheme, and starting from there. Once you do this, edit settings.py, and change your TEMPLATE_DIRS setting accordingly.
collective itself only really manages static pages and articles. Even then, the amount of data managed is very minimal. Most of the features of collective are provided in the UI. Disqus is used for comments by default. File upload mechanisms are not provided by collective on purpose, in favor of using other hosted mechanisms. Some examples are:
The justification for this when writing collective was that all of those services already do an amazing job in their specific focus areas, and nothing added here would rival them without a substantial amount of work.
To extend collective, you essentially need to know how to embed a hosted service into your posts or theme, or implement whichever service you need in Django.
For instance, if you wanted to change Article syntax to Textile, you would need to edit themes/yourtheme/articles/article.html and apply a Textile filter to the article body instead of the Markdown filter.
Adding a WYSIWYG editor would be a bit more involved. You'd have to edit admin templates, and also accept an article body format produced by the editor.
There aren't many stable, "complete" Django-based blog engines. This is rather ironic, given how amazingly fast it is to build a blog in Django. For more information on this topic, see my blog post.
At first, I had wanted to name this blog engine picard, as a tribute to Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard. However, there are already some existing applications/libraries named picard, and I didn't want to pollute the open-source namespace. collective works well because just as Jean-Luc was assimilated by the Borg, he is forever part of the collective. That's right, a little piece of Jean-Luc/Locutus is in this blog engine.
Also, this blog engine can stand on its own, but does much better when used in conjunction with other hosted services.
I may make changes here as I am able, but I don't have official plans to actively develop collective over time. That said, I'd be weary of anyone considering this a "dead" project, as it is stable and works great. Don't let the fact that it is not actively maintained deter you from using it! If you need help, I'm always available.