For better or worse Django doesn’t have any real blogging software. The mailing list is peppered by green practitioners asking “what’s the best django blogging software.” To which one of the old dogs on the list will lift it’s head, look left and right, reply is that it’s “trivial in Django to write your own” and sink back down to the floor.
The lack of a first class blog unit has become a bit of a problem though. There’s an empty spot in the trophy case. The question will invariably pop into people’s heads, “So do I use Django for my website or Wordpress?” While a perfectly fine question, it belies the fact that your comparing frameworks and an application and wondering which one is better. Are there ‘Wordpress developers’? And if so, do you really want to be one?
So it came with some excitement to learn that Django now has a fairly advanced blogging app, byteflow. Among the selling points:
“It has very clean codebase and developers, which are struggling to keep it so.”
Heh. That’s a dig at someone, but I’m not sure exactly who. Anyway, struggle on comrades.
My question is that with a contingent of great hackers why hasn’t anybody released a Django based blogging platform up until now. One reason is that by making it trivial to write a blog, nobody wanted to do more than the trivial work required to get it going. And great hackers don’t want to release trivial code. Would Beethoven want to release that jingle he wrote for AutoZone?
Perhaps a deeper reason is that blog/cms/site-swallowing software is an unruly beast with complex data flows resulting in spaghetti code. Exactly the kind of molasses you’d rather not swim in.
The reason that I care about this issue, is that there’s really much more you can do with Python and Django with ease than you can with Wordpress and PHP. The Wordpress page definitely looks a lot sexier than the Byteflow page (as do their exemplars). But beware.
Oh, if Python installs (setup.py, cough) went easier and mod_python didn’t require apache fiddling (more difficult in a shared hosting setting), we’d probably have universal health care coverage by now.
Everyday you have thousands of people installing Wordpress, now maybe you can staunch the flow and get them on the Python/Django path.
