PyArticle: Pythonic way to article handling

Today's web is world of articles. CMS, publishing pages, blogs, wikis...everything is about text-publishing. I'm using (and creating) every of them, but they were all essetially build on they own engines. I began to set up some new sites build on those, but I found no suitable working solution which allowed me to handle article publishing and I feel being forced to build yet-another-my-own-engine. So I decided to make one as an python module to avoid this lost of time for next projects and perhaps to help others facing same problem.

Library is publised under LGPL licence.

To add tickets, modify Wiki and so on, please log in as guest / pyarticle

What is PyArticle doing (or is planned to do)

Essentially, PyArticle is pythonic, easy-to-use text convertor and article handler. It can took input text in various easy-to-write formats (Asciidoc, Czechtile, ...) and product various outputs (Xhtml, Html, PDF, ODF, ...). Conversion is done via DocBook file format (which could be taken as input too of course). This has some issues (nature of some formats do not allow to cover their docbook conversion completely), but I think they are worth of it.

Article handler means that additionally, PyArticle provide easy way to save articles to various backends with transparent versioning (so no information will be lost). However, those two functions should not make API complicated if user are not intending to use them.

The ultimate goal is to provide a Very Simple Api for out-of-box working solution as well as complex one for application needing to specify each part of process. See ApiProposal for details.

What is done

  • Xhtml and Pdf output from Docbook4 (since alpha 1)
  • Asciidoc import support (since alpha 2)
  • Odf output from Docbook4 (since beta 1)
  • Invoking external handlers: support for Xsltproc, Saxon, Fop, Xep, asciidoc, docbook2odf
  • console frontend (since beta 1)

Near future

  • Backend and versioning support
  • More documentation, tutorial, use-cases, ...
  • web frontend
  • What We Need Is Done Release, buzz around and so on.

Project status

Project is now in beta stage, I've just began with development. If you're interested in this project, feel free to join PyArticle at Google Groups. Contributors, testers, idea bringers welcomed.

* 0.1 release is ready for download

How to use it

Documentation will be available after We Are Ready release will be done.

For quick overview see QuickExample, for more complex introspecition it's best to see unittests.

Dependencies

  • xsltproc or saxon for docbook -> xhtml/xsl-fo transformations
  • fop or xep for pdf output
  • asciidoc for asciidoc ,)
  • docbook2odf for ODF