FROG - Python Blogging software

Download the Frog webapp for Snakelets from SourceForge. (installation instructions) License: GNU GPL

What is FROG?

Frog, sounds like Blog, and is a web log (blog) tool written in Python, and designed as a web application for Snakelets. Frog is released under the Open-Source GNU GPL (note: that is different from Snakelets itself!).

Third party contributions can be found at the bottom of the page. There is a mailing list.

Current version information: see the installation instructions.          Here are a few Screenshots.

Frog Features

User experience:

• Multi-user support: run multiple blogs on a single server. Every user can specify her own front page.
• You can split an article in a short introduction and the longer extended text ("read more..." function)
• User-definable article categories for easy grouping and retrieval
• Allow or disallow commenting
• Preview your article or comment before posting
• "BBCode"-like formatting language allows some article markups, urls, image links, code blocks, quotes, lists...
• Easy embedding of images (inline or as file icon) and downloadable files ('short' links)
• Existing articles or comments can be edited
• Smileys in three colors (optional)
• Click-to-apply-formatting-tags in the text editor
• Email notification when a comment was added
• RSS feeds for recent articles and per category
• Calendar view of older articles
• Quick overview of 'active' articles: new ones or where comment has been added recently
• Search articles using full-text search, between certain dates, of a specific category, etc.
• Permanent links ('permalinks') to individual articles and comments
• Basic page customization (title, menu and footer text) by just editing a few fields in your user profile
• You can choose from three default page color styles (CSS stylesheets)
• Fully Unicode compatible. Type all strange characters that you want!
• Deeplink protection is possible against other sites linking to embedded images and files, this avoids bandwidth theft
• You can specify custom HTML meta tags to help search engines (meta keywords and meta description)
• Tightly integrated with FileMgr application (single logon)

Anti-Spam measures:

• commenters need to solve an easy random math puzzle (this makes it difficult for bots to dump spam; configurable).
• uses anti-spam hyperlinks in comment texts (so that links in comments are not indexed by search engines such as Google, it removes the use of dumping hyperlinks in blog comments to score better search rankings)
• uses a spammer url blacklist (so that it is not possible to write a comment that contains a blacklisted url. The blacklist is automatically updated on regular intervals. Configurable.)
• Email addresses of posters are only visible to the blog owner.

Technical:

• No database required! Frog stores its data as XML files in the filesystem. It performs well, and is very easy to backup.
• No additional software such as a webserver is required! Snakelets is all you need (because Frog is a webapp for Snakelets)
• Easy to customize the look and feel by editing template pages and CSS files.
• Generated pages are very efficient valid XHTML + CSS. Almost no images are used so pages load extremely fast.
• Because of div-based layout, and CSS, it's very easy to build your own visual layout.
• Small code base so easy to understand and extend/change.
• To keep things simple and small, Frog does not include a file management interaface, only a simple file browser. You'll have to upload pictures etc using FTP, SSH, or another tool, or download and install the FileMgr webapp (also available on this site). Frog is tightly integrated with FileMgr (single logon).

Future plans

To see the development status, visit the Frog Wiki page.

Related material and Contributions from others

I'm running Frog for my personal blog site, ofcourse. (Warning: most is written in Dutch)

I've also made a nifty web-based File Manager webapp that you can install next to Frog. You can use it to easily edit, create, upload, delete, move around the files (images and such) that you need for Frog. It is tightly integrated with Frog once installed.

Helio Pereira has created a very nice Weather extension.