Draconion

The libertarian blogging engine.

Draconion was designed with one purpose: to not force you down one path when you're setting up your new blog or website. Because of its flexibility, Draconion is very much DIY. Why should you use Draconion then? Because it provides a great way to get the skeleton of your site up and running, and allows you to easily use templating on a static website.

Draconion is proudly powered by the Bottle microframework's SimpleTemplateEngine. I stripped out the template engine code and have made it available in this repository, for ease of use.

NOTE: Your site doesn't even need to be a blog! Just remove the posts and archiveuri attributes from index.json, and you have a static homepage or whatever you want.

---

1. Have Python 2.7 installed on your system.
2. git clone https://github.com/fallingduck/draconion.git
3. cd draconion
4. python2 draconion.py --help

Before you make your blog live, I suggest editing the following:

1. index.json
2. static/templates/header.tpl - The layout of the site, also see static/resources/global.css

---

Writing a Blog Post

Writing a blog post with Draconion has gotten easier! Now, just run the following command:

$ python2 draconion.py write title-of-post

title-of-post should be a unique title, with hyphens instead of spaces. This will bring up the ubiquitous nano text editor, and allow you to edit the new post page to your content.

When you are ready to publish, simply run the following:

$ python2 draconion.py publish title-of-post

This will automatically generate a new version of your site. If you ever want to take back what you've written, you can run

$ python2 draconion.py retract title-of-post

---

When your site is ready to be deployed, run the following command:

$ python2 draconion.py compile

This command will create (or clean) the compiled/ directory, and will populate it with your site's static content and freshly rendered static html files. You can point your webserver (nginx, apache, or whatever) to the compiled/ directory, or you can move the compiled/ directory to wherever your files will be served from.

HINT: If you set up your web server to serve cleaner URIs (eg. removing the .html extension), you can specify a different uri format in index.json

HINT: Stick your .htaccess file in static/resources/.htaccess