smog is intended to be a lightweight yet feature-complete blog platform for individuals and organizations. I wrote smog in about 60 hours to learn web development using Python and the Flask microframework, after trying other blog platforms and deciding they weren't for me. I want smog to be a pleasure for bloggers, readers, and also developers who want to tweak or extend what their blog can do.
See a real-life example (also my personal blog) at https://blog.c-mart.in.
- Write posts in Markdown, plain text, or HTML
- Create blog posts and static pages; ideal for a web site with a mix of regular/new content and permanent/curated content like project pages or your resume
- Supports multiple content authors, each with their own account
- Guest comments are protected with a CSRF token and reCAPTCHA, which drastically limits the number of spam comments you'll need to deal with
- Comments can be enabled/disabled per post and are easy to moderate
- Super mobile-friendly. Also renders nicely without JavaScript, because some people don't want to run your JavaScript
- Written in Python using Flask microframework and several of its extensions
- Easy to modify and extend, fairly complete test coverage will let you know if you break stuff
- Uses SQLAlchemy with modular back-end: use any database you like
- Built-in database migrations (using Flask-Migrate) allows you to update the database of your deployed blog when new features are added to smog
- Input validation using WTForms
- Complete source only ~200 KB (as of March 2016)
- GNU GPL licensed
- Username: 'test@test.com'
- Password: 'test'
Here you can create some posts and play with the settings. The demo site is automatically destroyed and re-created every 30 minutes, so if you're having trouble just try again in half an hour.
If you have Docker installed, you can download and run a demo copy of smog with just one command:
docker run --name smog -p 80:5000 cmart/smog-demo
Then, browse to http://localhost and you should have a demo site running. Log in with username 'test@test.com' and password 'test'.
WARNING: the smog-demo docker image is for evaluation purposes and not secured for production use. It runs as a privileged user, uses the default Flask development WSGI server with default secret keys, and doesn't have HTTPS support. Please do not trust it with any sensitive data or leave it exposed to the internet.
See install_guide.md.
cdto your smog repository folder and rungit pullto update the repository- Activate your smog virtualenv, e.g.:
source /var/www/smog-venv/bin/activate)- Set your SMOG_CONFIG environment variable to point to your configuration file, e.g.:
SMOG_CONFIG=/var/www/smog_config.py)- Run the database upgrade script to apply latest schema version:
python manage.py db upgrade- Restart your web server:
- (sudo)
service apache2 restart
(As mentioned in the installation guide, future database schema changes probably won't work if you're running a SQLite database. If you're using MySQL or PostgreSQL, update on.)
smog does not yet fully protect against CSRF. This will change when WTForms is fully integrated with the site.
smog is not yet recommended for blog admins that don't completely trust their authors (authenticated users) with admin-level site access, for two reasons:
- There is currently no separation of privileges between users. Any authenticated user can CRUD other user accounts.
- When a user account is disabled, the disabled user is not prevented from doing anything until he or she logs out.
If you will be the only post author, or you will only have a handful of trusted users, then rock on.
Python 2.7.8 or later, and the modules listed in requirements.txt
- Default template uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_Desktop_Project#Palette
Copyright 2016 Chris Martin. smog is free software released under the GNU GPL version 3.