About a blog, part II

In my last post about this CMS, I promised to write about how I ended up with Django. When I originally decided to roll my own blogging software, I was planning to do it with Zope 3. While Python has a plethora of frameworks— probably more than most languages—I have experience building things with Zope and I like it, so that seemed like a good fit. For the time being, Pylons, TurboGears, Web.py, CherryPy, Django, and many lesser-known web frameworks weren't under consideration.

There's a really common bit of boilerplate javascript code I find myself using all the time. Basically, I'll have a function that, becuase it manipulates the DOM, needs to be called after the page has loaded. Rather than having to assign these functions to the window.onload event manually, I was looking for a shorter way.

This is the first post on my new blog, so I may as well start out by explaining how this thing got here.

So, I've never actually had my own blog before. I've set up blogs for others and I've played around with different blogging software, but when it came time to create my own, it took me a while to decide how to power it. I started with a list of criteria for I wanted for my CMS:

• Is secure
• Allows user comments
• Provides some sort of caching (of DB queries, rendered pages, whatever) to help the site scale
• Can be extended and has a code base I'd actually want to extend
• Stores templates in the filesystem, not in the DB
• Can be deployed in a shared hosting environment
• Is free or inexpensive and is open source

I also had one other sort of "bonus" criteria which I didn't insist on but which would be nice:

• Is written in python