Flask-Blogging: A Python Flask Blog Engine as an Extension

This post will give an introduction to Markdown based Flask blog engine extension.

I wanted to add a blog to my flask site. I decided to write it as an extension. This makes the blog code easy to plug into any site, and fairly reusable.

Flask-Blogging is a blog engine as a Flask extension based on Markdown. Please see:

Flask-Blogging documentation
Flask-Blogging github project page

Out of the box Flask-Blogging has support for the following:

Bootstrap based site
Markdown based blog editor
Models to store blog
Authentication of User’s choice
Sitemap, ATOM support
Disqus support for comments
Google analytics for usage tracking
Well documented, tested, and extensible design

Minimal Example

Here is a minimal example for getting a blog up and running. There is no security in the authentication here. But if you have authentication setup using either Flask-Login or Flask-Security, it should be straight forward to configure authentication. This example uses version 0.3.2.

from flask import Flask, render_template_string, redirect
from sqlalchemy import create_engine, MetaData
from flask.ext.login import UserMixin, LoginManager, \
    login_user, logout_user
from flask.ext.blogging import SQLAStorage, BloggingEngine

app = Flask(__name__)
app.config["SECRET_KEY"] = "secret"  # for WTF-forms and login
app.config["BLOGGING_URL_PREFIX"] = "/blog"
app.config["BLOGGING_DISQUS_SITENAME"] = "test"
app.config["BLOGGING_SITEURL"] = "http://localhost:8000"

# extensions
engine = create_engine('sqlite:////tmp/blog.db')
meta = MetaData()
sql_storage = SQLAStorage(engine, metadata=meta)
blog_engine = BloggingEngine(app, sql_storage)
login_manager = LoginManager(app)
meta.create_all(bind=engine)

# user class for providing authentication
class User(UserMixin):
    def __init__(self, user_id):
        self.id = user_id

    def get_name(self):
        return "Paul Dirac"  # typically the user's name

@login_manager.user_loader
@blog_engine.user_loader
def load_user(user_id):
    return User(user_id)

index_template = """
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
    <head> </head>
    <body>
        {% if current_user.is_authenticated() %}
            <a href="/logout/">Logout</a>
        {% else %}
            <a href="/login/">Login</a>
        {% endif %}
        &nbsp&nbsp<a href="/blog/">Blog</a>
        &nbsp&nbsp<a href="/blog/sitemap.xml">Sitemap</a>
        &nbsp&nbsp<a href="/blog/feeds/all.atom.xml">ATOM</a>
    </body>
</html>
"""

@app.route("/")
def index():
    return render_template_string(index_template)

@app.route("/login/")
def login():
    user = User("testuser")
    login_user(user)
    return redirect("/blog")

@app.route("/logout/")
def logout():
    logout_user()
    return redirect("/")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    app.run(debug=True, port=8000, use_reloader=True)

Screen Shots

Blog Editor

Here is a screenshot of the blog editor page. This editor uses the awesome Bootstrap-Markdown editor.

Blog Editor

Blog Page

The blog page when rendered looks as shown here. The page is configured out of the box to include LaTeX support. The math is rendered using MathJax. I have thought about using KaTex, but decided to wait till they have support for eqnarray. As you can see, it uses Disqus for comments.

Blog Page

Installation

Install the extension with the following commands:

$ easy_install flask-blogging

or alternatively if you have pip installed:

$ pip install flask-blogging

Conclusion

Here I introduced the Flask-Blogging extension that can be used as a flask blog engine to your flask site.

python flask programming

Related Post

I am Goutham Balaraman, and I explore topics in quantitative finance, programming, and data science. You can follow me @gsbalaraman.

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