In my ongoing quest to build my web-based Django web site, the next step is creating a blog. The problem – there is no definitive blogging application for Django. That’s I guess true for any decent web framework – blogging is an application that’s simple enough that nobody bothers to go past what their own needs are.

There are a few decent starting points, for sure. If that’s what you’re after, here’s the list:

• django-basic-apps
  The canonic starting point for a lot of Django apps. It takes care not only of blogs, but a lot of other fairly common things (movies, music, books, bookmarks, places, people,…) too. Seems to be maintained by a single person.

• Django Techblog
  Mostly worth mentioning for its integration of Microblogging. While it’s only a single person working at it, it looks like a fairly active application. There seem to be at least 10-15 check-ins per month.

• MightyLemon
  Fairly active, multiple committers. Nothing special about it, as far as I can tell. (Unless you’re a huge Leah Culver fan)

• BlogMaker
  Fairly large feature set, but very infrequent commits, even though the author only think it’s worthy of a 0.6. Definitely a good place to see how others solved a lot of blogging issues.

• ByteFlow
  Large feature list, single committer (mostly).If you want a feature complete solution that requires minimal work, this would probably be the best choice.

• Soturi
  Fairly minimal code, few changes, seems abandoned since December ‘08. Good project if you want to see a minimalist blog

• Banjo
  The most curious case of all of them. Somebody put quite a bit of design effort into having a nice home for this, clearly intending to make this a good reference implementation – but then fell short of providing much useful content on the page. From the looks of the repository, it seems to be under more or less active development by at least one person.

After thinking about all of this for a bit of time, I decided to roll my own – after all, the main purpose of my new blog is learning about Django, so I might as well do more than just download some code…

I’m still lazy enough to look for a decent starting point that takes care of a lot of grunt work – and that allows me to post fairly soon. (I really want to start writing, and not postpone it for another few months.)

As a result of all that, I decided to start based from django-basic-apps. It’s the canonic solution, it’s hosted on github (my vcs host of choice), and it seems to be under active development. I can always borrow from the other ones, should the need arise…

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