E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Then I taught photographers how to create good websites. I co-wrote a book along the way. Now I am helping turn a giant media corporation into a digital enterprise. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive. The markup engine is Markdown.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

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At least 184628 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

A minimal wiki in Django

TheWiki I built a proto-wiki in Django as an exercise for learning how to make a custom template filter. It's absurdly easy, it turns out. Per the docs I added a templatetags module; here's all the code in it -- wikitags.py: 

from django.core import template
register = template.Library()

@register.filter
def wikify(value):
    "Makes WikiWords"
    import re
    wikifier = re.compile(r'\b(([A-Z]+[a-z]+){2,})\b')
    return wikifier.sub(r'<a href="/\1/">\1</a>', value)

Then, in my page template:

{% load wikitags %}
<h1>{{ page.title }}</h1>
<div class="body">
    {{ page.content|wikify }}
</div>
...

I wrote about 60 lines of Python code in total. There are much smaller wiki engines, of course, but given the flexibility and expandability offered by Django I think that's pretty good.

The source code is available for anyone who'd like to take a look at it. Consider it MIT licensed if for some reason you actually want to use or extend it.

One thing this highlighted for me is that I don't know the best way to package up a Django app for re-use. Making that process easy, well understood, and perhaps even semi-automated will do a lot for Django as people start accumulating serious components.

Update, 2006-02-13: I've modernized the code to work with the "magic-removal" branch of Django.

Monday, December 12th, 2005
+ +
15 comments

Some related posts: Making your way from PHP to Python and Django • World's ugliest Django app • Django Unicodification • Django.June • Handling legacy URLs with Django • Django as superego • Moving the blog to Django • WebKit screen-grabbers • Controller freaks • Python web framework mania
• Comment from Luke Plant , later that day

Re: packaging apps, this page might be helpful:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/DosAndDontsForApplicationWriters

There is a setup.py example included.

• Comment from Paul , later that day

Excellent, thanks. I came across that many months ago and then forgot about it. I think it'll be a while before I have anything substantial worth distributing, though...

• Comment from dp_wiz , 2 weeks later

Great one! Very very nice and helpfull.

• Comment from Paul K , 12 months later

Great tutorial, very to the point. Minor correction, on my version of Django the template module resides in a different place. Not sure if it has to do with Django versions. If you get errors try: (remove core)

from django import template

• Comment from Ankur Sethi , 18 months later

A suggestion that if the site were hosted it would be wonderful, we could see it in action.

• Comment from Paul , 18 months later

Hi Ankur,

For now, there's an install here: http://demo.e-scribe.com/wiki/

However, it has absolutely no spam or XSS protection, so I won't be leaving it up forever.

• Comment from Tom , 18 months later

Hi Paul,

Thank you for this article and for your site in general.

I have a question about protowiki. Why didn't you use the create/update/delete generic views that come with Django?

Thanks, Tom

• Comment from Paul , 18 months later

Hi Tom, I can't actually remember why I didn't use generic views with this app. It was originally written over a year and a half ago, which is like 20 in Django years. I think that some of the wiki-specific behavior, like redirecting to an edit page on a 404, might have been more than I wanted to twist generic views to do at the time. In any case, a version that relied more on generic views (wrapping them where needed for special functionality) would be a nice update.

• Comment from Tom , 2 years later

Everything:~ tomsmith$ hg clone static-http://hg.open.e-scribe.com abort: HTTP Error 404: Not Found

Everything:~ tomsmith$ hg clone http://hg.open.e-scribe.com destination directory: hg.open.e-scribe.com abort: 'http://hg.open.e-scribe.com/' does not appear to be an hg repository!

• Comment from Paul , 2 years later

Sorry about that, Tom -- fixed now!

• Comment from machinehuman , 2 years later

Very nice! Do you have plans for spam protection?

• Comment from Paul , 2 years later

Thanks! This is not something I'm maintaining, but if I were to implement spam protection I'd likely base it on Akismet, like I do for my blog, possibly with DNSBLs as a first line of defense.

• Comment from Sam Rose , 2 years later

is this code still available?

• Comment from Josh , 4 years later

Source code link seems broken. Update?

• Comment from Paul , 4 years later

This code has definitely fallen by the wayside. Here's a link to it for those who have asked. Be warned: it was last updated around the time of Django 0.96, so it won't run under 1.x without a little tweaking. http://staticfling.net/_temp/protowiki.zip

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