matagus

Aug 09

Building my web site

Some notes about this website.

As I've said before, this is a simple Django powered site that I've built integrating some existing apps (the great mingus blog engine, portfolio, pagination and tagging) and my own django-planet app into a site-project. Let me now explain a little about each componet app.

  • Mingus is the main component. It`s a blog engine with a lot of useful features I like: oembed support, inline media, dinamic blocks, pages and navbar menu, nice blog urls, disqus integration... Mingus itself provides no models: it's just a chunk of other django reusable apps (basic, disqus, djangodblog, django_extensions, django_proxy, elsewhere, flatblocks, navbar, oembed, sorl-thumbnails, template_utils, tagging) joined together plus an adhoc core app and the project (some simple and nice css themes, the other static files, custom templates, the main urls.py file, and settings and local settings). It's very easy to get it work. Despite the fact that many of these apps lack of documentacion about how to configure centain things (elsewhere links, how to use inline app), it was really easy to get things done.
  • Portfolio: It`s a pretty simple app that you can use to show the world your portfolio or the projects you are or you've been working on, the web-way to show your resume: it has categories to group your projects and skills to add to them, allowing to anybody to browse them by category or skill.
  • Planet: it's a django reusable app that I'm developing. It's a feed aggregator that allows you to build a planet of blogs or feeds. It makes use of two other nice apps: tagging and pagination.

Mingus powered site using my custom theme.

Also I had modified several templates (from mingus, portfolio and planet apps) in order to make it posible to glue them and make them fit my needs, a few views, added some custom CSS, and created the mingus theme that you are enjoying (or maybe hating :P). I will be contributing back to each project as soon as I get some time to put it all in order and document it of course.

Related tags: blog, django, english, mingus, planet, portfolio