This is the second release of the contributed plugins pack for PyBlosxom 1.2. In terms of functionality, there were a bunch of fixes to the comments and trackbacks components and I overhauled pycategories. Beyond that, there were a lot of license changes (or in most cases license applications) and some documentation changes. In general, this release is a huge milestone for sorting out the big mess that was the contributed plugins.

Bravo to Wari, Ted, Steven, Blake, Bill, and everyone else that was involved in pulling this together.

If you find problems with contributed plugins, visit this page on how to contact us. "Problems" could be bugs, feature-requests, or setup issues.

Find the contributed plugin pack here (contrib.1.2.1.tar.gz).

I've been doing SourceForge releases for years and it's kind of a pain in the ass and I've always dreaded the two or three hours it takes to get all the pieces in line and do a release.

Steven Armstrong mentioned using ReleaseForge which makes half of that process _so_ much easier to deal with. I highly recommend it to anyone in the same boat I'm in.

The nice thing about writing the logic backwards for something is the behavior ends up exactly the opposite of what you were expecting. ^[1] That's what makes this sort of thing easy to find.

After you realize what's going on, it becomes a matter of figuring out where to place the ! .

^[1] That's a terrible sentence.

I plain ran out of time and energy to work on PyBlosxom, so I stepped down as maintainer. I'll stay on the project as an occasional developer.

I went through my plugins and discovered wbgpager had a bug in it that prevented it from working with PyBlosxom 1.2. So I fixed it and released wbgpager 1.2. You can find it here with all the other plugins I've done. I also made some fixes to some of the other plugins. So if you're using anything I wrote, you might want to check to see if there are new versions.

Seems like it's ok so far. So I released it rather than continuing to sit on it. I've done a lot of work on the manual to cover the areas that were covered poorly or not covered at all. There's still a lot of material to cover, but we're definitely making measurable progress in that direction.

Steven Armstrong did a lot of work to get mod_python, WSGI, and Twisted supported. I'm not sure why anyone would use WSGI or Twisted, though, since they don't appear to make much difference in how fast PyBlosxom works. mod_python definitely helps, though. Steven has some runtime statistics here.

This feels like a good release. We met some goals, we didn't sit on it forever, the documentation is an order of magnitude better than it was for the previous version (though it has a long way to go, still), and we fixed a bunch of bugs.

Having said that, it's definitely not necessary for people to upgrade. I think if your blog works and you don't need to futz with it to get additional functionality, leave well enough alone.

I'm almost done the next version of the PyBlosxom manual. At the suggestion of Steven, I converted the manual thus far from html to docbook. I still need to do a lot of work in terms of indexing and adding warnings and notes and various other indicators like that. I'm busy re-writing chapters to reflect issues people are having on the pyblosxom-users list.

I think I've worked between 20 and 30 hours on it over the last week and a half--it's almost like another part time job.

We're going to try to push out PyBlosxom 1.2 in the next week or two. Steven did a lot of work fixing up static rendering and also fixing the architecture pieces that caused PyBlosxom to kind of suck when used in various frameworks like WSGI, Twisted and mod_python. I'm also going to do another round of documentation content.

We're going to push fixing the file handling to the next version. We want to allow for index caching and also reduce the number of times PyBlosxom walks your blogdir for entries. Both of these new abilities will significantly reduce the time it takes for large blogs to render. Getting there....

The plan is to have these changes in before Ted's talk at PyCon.

Got the notice from Network Solutions today stating that unless I renew right this second, the domain name is free again for anyone's taking.

I had worked with George to get Planet PyBlosxom up and running, but he seems to have paged out and hasn't responded to the last few emails I've sent.

It was an interesting thing to run for a year.

In lieu of other solutions, I'm going to start releasing contributed plugins plugin packs. This one should work with PyBlosxom 1.1.

If you find problems with contributed plugins, visit this page on how to contact us. "Problems" could be bugs, feature-requests, or setup issues.

If this works out, then I'll continue releasing contributed plugin packs that match up to PyBlosxom.

Find the contributed plugin pack here (contrib.1.1.tar.gz).

Steven's been doing development on PyBlosxom to allow for other frameworks than plain CGI. The architecture changes he's making solves some other issues as well. The problem we've bumped into is that one of the things he wants to do requires us to change the minimum Python version from 2.1 to 2.2.

Details here.

Bill noted that it's likely that PyBlosxom won't work in 2.1 as it is now anyhow. I'm not sure--I don't have Python 2.1 anymore.

So the question is would it be ok to change the minimum requirements. Some folks who cannot change the version of Python they have will have issues with this (obviously), but is it a good idea anyhow? Is the world at a place where it's common to require at least Python 2.2 a for projects?