SourceForge switched the mount to read-only so we've taken down comments and other interactive features from this web-site.

I'm working on PyBlosxom 1.3 and project infrastructure. In the queue:

• pyblosxom 1.3 changes
  • fix bugs
  • flesh out variables for native RSS 2.0 and ATOM 0.3 flavours
• generate a todo list for the web-site
• add CVS usage blurbs to the development howto

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Zack sends this email:

Hello,

I discovered this vulnerability while playing with pyblosxom,  
which uses python files to store configuration information. The  
way it is packaged by Debian, the global config file /etc/ 
pyblosxom/config.py is created with 640 permissions, owned by the  
root user and the www-data group, of which apache httpd is a  
member. When the config file is imported by pyblosxom, a  
config.pyc is created with 644 permissions. If, for example, an  
XMLRPC password is specified in that file, it will be readable by  
any user.

We're looking into how we can alleviate this issue. We've contacted the Debian maintainer and will work with him to fix the issue in Debian. I haven't looked into whether this affects other distributions or not.

In the meantime if you're running PyBlosxom in such a way, make sure the permissions to your config.pyc file are appropriate.

This is the third release of the contributed plugins pack for PyBlosxom 1.2.

Here's the list of changes between contributed pack 1.2.1 and 1.2.2:

General

• New CHANGELOG.txt file which describes the changes between this version and the last as well as compatability and behavior issues.
• New README.txt file which describes what's in the contributed plugins pack, where you can find it, and various other things about the contributed plugins pack.

genericwiki

• Matej updated genericwiki so that it works as an entryparser as well as a preformatter. Will fixed up the documentation. genericwiki was moved from the preformatter directory to the entryparser directory. Thanks Matej!

pycategories

• Now has two new properites "category_start" which gets printed once before printing the category list and "category_finish" which gets printed once after printing the category list. Additionally, the default values for "category_begin" and "category_end" were fixed. This makes the default output for pycategories (x)html compliant. Thanks Joseph!

comments

• comments no longer shows comments by default! In order to view comments for a given entry, you must append "showcomments=yes" to the querystring. THIS IS NOT A BACKWARDS-COMPATIBLE CHANGE! Thanks David!
• comments no longer has documentation for the unused comments-rejected-words property.
• comments no longer requires the email field.
• all the flavour templates for the comments plugin have been updated.
• We cleaned up the comment error messages so they're useful to the user. Thanks Nathaniel!

w3cdate

• w3cdate plugin now provides $w3cdate in head and foot templates. It no longer requires PyXML. Thanks to Steven and Matej!

Thanks to Steven, David, Joseph, Matej, and Nathaniel for their contributions and help.

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.1.2.2.tar.gz).

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

This is a minor bugfix for PyBlosxom 1.2. If you use the conditionalhttp plugin, you'll want to upgrade. Otherwise, it's not crucial.

Changes:

• Fixed a problem where the blosxom renderer never c hecked to see if it had already rendered the page. This affects the conditionalhttp plugin, but not much else.
• Removed an extra filestat.
• Added a setTimeLazy method to the FileEntry class.

If you have any problems, check out the PyBlosxom Manual and if that doesn't help, send us questions on the pyblosxom-users mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Thanks to work from both Robert Wall and David Geller, I've added a list of PyBlosxom users to the site. David did some work that makes the output a lot nicer, but I haven't quite gotten to working his script into the system. So this is a semi-temporary kluge for the time being.

I've been continuing to work on the PyBlosxom manual. I've put the latest version on the site. You can find the following information there:

• information installation
• information on setup and configuration
• a list of config.py variables and what they do
• information on plugins
• information on flavours
• information on static rendering
• information on syndication options
• how to write entries
• ...

If you're new to PyBlosxom, having problems with PyBlosxom, or are curious about things, check out the latest PyBlosxom 1.2 manual.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

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).

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

I updated the site to use PyBlosxom 1.2. I also made some minor changes to the registry plugin that drives the Plugin Registry and the Flavour Registry. If you notice any problems, let us know on the pyblosxom-devel mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

I did a quick update to the links on the menu bar of the web-site (you can see the menu bar to the left there). We need to maintain separate versions of the documentation for prior versions of PyBlosxom and it was getting messy so I moved all documentation links to the new documentation page. Hopefully it's clear enough for new users and old users alike.

The list of things we've been thinking about doing for PyBlosxom is really long and contains items that have been fleshed out as well as items that haven't been fleshed out at all and are currently just looking for someone to do some more analysis. I'm going to take my notes and dump a bunch of "feature requests" in the feature tracker on the SourceForge section. The trackers are mildly crappy, but it's better than spending the time right now to build something on our own.

The plan right now is to let PyBlosxom 1.2 simmer a bit and shake out some of the issues it might have. Additionally, I'm going to try to spend some more time on fleshing out the manual and fixing up the contributed plugins that I either wrote or had a hand in writing.

We've got some ideas about what the next version will entail, but nothing is set in stone. It's likely we'll know more in a month.

And lastly, Planet PyBlosxom is no more. I had the domain name for a year and ran the site, but then decided I didn't want to run it any more. At some point, I'll set up something on here, but it's low-ish on my todo list at the moment.

I think that about covers it for this status update.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

This contributed plugins pack contains a bunch of plugins and scripts that should work with PyBlosxom 1.2. Use these plugins at your own risk.

Each plugin should have documentation at the top of the plugin file. Read that for installation instructions. If you find any bugs or have any problems, contact us at pyblosxom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net .

Download it here.

This is a followup for the contrib 1.1 release. These plugins should work with PyBlosxom 1.1.

Use these plugins at your own risk. Each plugin should have documentation at the top of the plugin file. Read that for installation instructions.

If you find any bugs or have any problems, contact us at pyblosxom-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

The only difference between 1.1 and 1.1.1 is that I removed the bad block of code in the comments plugin. If you are using PyBlosxom 1.1 and either have the comments plugin working fine or you're not using it at all, then don't worry about this release.

Download it here.

Pertinent to users:

1. We added a "blog_email" item to config.py and changed "blog_author" to just the author's name. Examples:

      py["blog_email"] = "joe@blah.com"
      py["blog_author"] = "Joe Man"
   

2. We no longer adjust blog_title from what you set in config.py. Now we have a "blog_title_with_path" variable which is in the data dict which is the blog_title with the path information. People who want the title of their blog to be the title and not include the path should use $blog_title. Folks who want the old behavior where the path was appended to the title should use $blog_title_with_path .

3. We now support WSGI, mod_python, and Twisted in addition to CGI.

4. Upped our Python requirement to Python 2.2. If you have an earlier version than that, you won't be able to use PyBlosxom 1.2.

5. Changed "defaultFlavour" to "default_flavour". This property allows you to specify the flavour to use by default if the URI doesn't specify one. It default to "html".

6. We moved the main PyBlosxom site to http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/ . There's a "powered by pyblosxom" image at:

   http://pyblosxom.sourceforge.net/images/pb_pyblosxom.gif

   You should adjust your templates accordingly.

Pertinent to developers and plugin developers:

1. We now have a Request and a Response object. See API documentation for more details.

2. Don't use os.environ directly--use the http dict. For example, this is bad:

      path_info = os.environ["HTTP_PATHINFO"]
   

   This is what you should be doing:

      http = request.getHttp()
      path_info = http["HTTP_PATHINFO"]
   

   If you use os.environ directly, it's likely your plugin won't work with non-CGI installations of PyBlosxom.

3. We added __iter__, read, readline, readlines, seek, and tell to the Request object. All of them access the input stream. You should not use sys.stdin directly.

   Usage:

      data = request.read()
      data_part = request.read(1024)
      one_line = request.readline()
      lines = request.readlines()
   

4. The output stream should be accessed through the PyBlosxom Response object. The following methods are implemented in the Response object: __iter__, close, flush, read, readline, readlines, seek, tell, write, writelines, setStatus, and addHeader. You should not use sys.stdout directly. See the API for more details.

   Usage:

      response = request.getResponse()
      response.addHeader('Status', '200 Ok')
      response.addHeader('Content-type', 'text/html')
      response.write("Hello World")
      response.writelines(["list", "of", "data"])
   

5. Instead of doing:

      form = request.getHttp()["form"]
   

   you can now do:

      form = request.getForm()
   

6. Plugins should not be importing the config module and looking at the py dict directly. You should instead use the Request getConfiguration() method to get the config py dict.

Also, we have a new manual. I converted the manual I was writing in HTML over to docbook, made a lot of changes, and added a lot more content covering installation, configuration, flavours, and plugins. We're still missing content on developing plugins and PyBlosxom's architecture. That will come with future versions of the manual.

The new PyBlosxom manual can be found here.

If you have problems, check out the new PyBlosxom Manual and if that doesn't help, send us questions on the pyblosxom-users mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

Up until PyBlosxom 1.1, we included a series of contributed plugins in the ./contrib directory. These plugins were also listed in the registry. When PyBlosxom 1.1 released without this contrib directory we created the problem where no one was able to get a hold of the contributed plugins without downloading a previous version of PyBlosxom.

We're going to split up the release schedules for PyBlosxom and the contributed plugins pack. This makes it easier for us to fix problems with plugins without having to do another release of PyBlosxom.

We've released the first contributed plugins pack. It's versioned along-side PyBlosxom. So contrib.1.1 goes with PyBlosxom 1.1.

You can find the contributed plugins pack here.

I added API and callback documentation for 1.1. It's very similar to the 1.0 documentation, though, so there's nothing really exciting there.

I also updated the "current release" note at the top of the main page.

Several people have remarked how some of the plugins in the plugin registry state that they come with pyblosxom which is no longer the case. We're working on putting together a separate contributed plugins pack release. Additionally, we're working on having the plugins available separately. This should be somewhat solved by February. In the meantime, you can use the plugins you have with your existing PyBlosxom 1.0 installation or download the PyBlosxom 1.0 tarball and get the plugins from there.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)

It's been a long time coming, but it's here now. Changes since the last release:

Pertinent to users:

1. We no longer include contributed plugins and flavours with the release. To find plugins and flavours, use the PyBlosxom registry.
2. We changed how num_entries is handled internally. If num_entries is set to 0, the blosxom default file handler will display all the entries. If num_entries is set to a positive number, then the blosxom default file handler will display at most that many entries.

Pertinent to developers and plugin developers:

1. Plugins that implement cb_filelist are now in charge of adjusting the number of entries to be displayed based on the num_entries configuration variable. This is no longer done in the renderer.
2. We added HTTP_COOKIE to the list of things that get added to the http dict in the Request object.

I know there will be some issues with us not packaging contributed plugins with the code. We're planning to package contributed plugins in a separate release with its own release cycle.

If you have problems, check out the PyBlosxom Manual and if that doesn't help, send us questions on the pyblosxom-users mailing list.

/will (willhelm at users dot sourceforge dot net)