It's nonrel blog time, again! We really wanted to post last week, but we had to finish something before PyCon. Drums please...

We've moved our blog to our new website built with Django nonrel. It's hosted on App Engine, but it should also work with other cloud DBs once we have more DB backends. The code is open-source, so you can build your own Django nonrel-based website and contribute improvements.

The project comes with a simple CMS (a shamefully simple CMS :) and you can also create multiple independent blogs. Update: We once had two blogs on this site, but we've slimmed them down to the blog you're reading now.

For now, we'll mostly focus on Django, but if you want to follow us more closely you should also consider subscribing to the other blogs.

Features

All content is written in reStructuredText markup and Pygments is used for code highlighting. You can manage all pages and blog posts via the admin interface.

Comments are handled by Disqus. It doesn't make sense to write a new comments app because Disqus offers a much more complete solution out-of-the-box. You can login via Twitter, Facebook, and other social community sites. Rewriting this from scratch would've been a huge task.

Similarly, Google Custom Search is used because its quality is superior to any home-grown solution you can build on App Engine.

We also have FeedBurner integration. We only publish Atom feeds and no RSS because FeedBurner can take care of the feed conversion.

Google Analytics can be activated via a simple line in settings.py.

Finally, there are a few spread-the-word features. Blogs automatically get a subscription widget in the sidebar and FeedFlares at the bottom of each post. Additionally, a retweet button is shown at the top of each post.

Uhm, you can also edit the menu and sidebar via the admin interface by creating blocks with that name. It's really very very simple. The code should be pretty easy to follow and modify. We just needed a simple tool for hosting our projects, documentations, and blogs.

More information

We'll soon post an article on DjangoDose with more details about the code. In particular, we're going to compare the nonrel DB code with normal model (SQL compatible) code.

Do you like it?

Please comment! Let us know if you (don't) like the design, the idea, the code, or if you have a suggestion for improvement.