django-pingback

This two applications provide 3 connected services: pingback server, pingback client and directory ping client.

Depends on the django-xmlrpc.

Configuration

First, install the django-xmlrpc application. You can download it either from repo or just use setuptools:

easy_install -f http://pypi.aartemenko.com django-xmlrpc

Next, download and install django-pingback:

• download sources from main repository
• or use easy_install django-pingback
• add pingback to your INSTALLED_APPS
• run ./manage.py syncdb
• setup client and server callbacks.

Connecting server

Pingback server receives pings from other sites, so, we must create function which binds our URLs an objects.

But first of all, add this urlpattern to your urls configuration:

((r'^xmlrpc/$', 'django_xmlrpc.views.handle_xmlrpc', {}, 'xmlrpc'))

It is a handler for all xmlrpc requests.

Usually, blog has a detailed view for each post. Suppose that our view has name post_detail and accepts one keyword arguments slug.

Here is simple example, how to make Post objects pingable:

from datetime import time, date, datetime
from time import strptime

from blog.models import Post
from pingback import create_ping_func
from django_xmlrpc import xmlrpcdispatcher

# create simple function which returns Post object and accepts
# exactly same arguments as 'details' view.
def pingback_blog_handler(slug, **kwargs):
    return Post.objects.get(slug=slug)

# define association between view name and our handler
ping_details = {'post_detail': pingback_blog_handler}

# create xml rpc method, which will process all
# ping requests
ping_func = create_ping_func(**ping_details)

# register this method in the dispatcher
xmlrpcdispatcher.register_function(ping_func, 'pingback.ping')

Now, go at you http://mysweetsite.com/xmlrpc/ and you should see pingback.ping method among few other system methods. If it is not there, then you made mistake in you server setup.

Also, you need to tell other sites, that your blog accepts pingbacks. You can do it by adding a link in the head of your site:

<link rel="pingback" href="{% url 'xmlrpc' %}" />

Or by adding X-Pingback HTTP header. Do do this, just add such line in the settings.py:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = [
    # ...
    'pingback.middleware.XPingMiddleware',
]

Connecting client signals

Let's suppose, that you have a blog and want to ping external sites (like Technorati) on post save, and to receive pingbacks from other sites. Next two sections contain simple 'how-to' enable these features.

At first, setup configuration in the settings, here is an example:

DIRECTORY_URLS = (
    'http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2',
    'http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping',
)

Next, you must connect some signals to ping workers, which created using ping_external_links and ping_directories functions:

from django.db.models import signals
from pingback.client import ping_external_links, ping_directories
from blog.models import Post

signals.post_save.connect(
        ping_external_links(content_attr = 'html',
                            url_attr = 'get_absolute_url'),
        sender = Post, weak = False)

signals.post_save.connect(
        ping_directories(content_attr = 'html',
                         url_attr = 'get_absolute_url'),
        sender = Post, weak = False)

Please note, that in the content_attr you must give either attribute or method name, which returns HTML content of the object.

If you don't have such attribute or method, for example if you apply markdown filter in the template, then content_func argument can be used instead of the content_attr.

content_func must return HTML, and must accepts an instance as a single argument.

Pay attention to the weak = False argument. If case of omitting django's event dispatcher will remove your signal.

Template tags

To show pingbacks on your page, you can use code like this:

{% load pingback_tags %}
{% get_pingback_list for object as pingbacks %}
{% if pingbacks %}
    <h1>Pingbacks</h1>
    {% for pingback in pingbacks %}
        <div class="b-pingback">
            <p class="b-meta">
                <a name="pingback-{{ pingback.id }}" href="{{ object.get_absolute_url }}#pingback-{{ pingback.id }}" class="b-permlink">permalink</a>
                {{ pingback.date }}, pingback from {{ pingback.url|urlizetrunc:40 }}:
            </p>

            <p>{{ pingback.content }}</p>
        </div>
    {% endfor %}
{% endif %}

Also you can use {% get_pingback_count for object as cnt %}, to save pingbacks' count in the context variable.