jpmartinspt / canonicalwebteam.blog

Canonical blog extension

This extension allows you to add a simple frontend section to your flask app. All the articles are pulled from Canonical's Wordpress back-end through the JSON API.

This extension provides a blueprint with 3 routes:

• "/": that returns the list of articles
• "/": the article page
• "/feed": provides a RSS feed for the page.

How to install

To install this extension as a requirement in your project, you can use PIP;

pip install canonicalwebteam.blog

See also the documentation for (pip install)[https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_install/].

How to use

Templates

The module expects HTML templates at blog/index.html, blog/article.html, blog/blog-card.html, blog/archives.html, blog/upcoming.html and blog/author.html.

An example of these templates can be found at https://github.com/canonical-websites/jp.ubuntu.com/tree/master/templates/blog.

Flask

In your app you can then:

    import flask
    from canonicalwebteam.blog import BlogViews
    from canonicalwebteam.blog.flask import build_blueprint

    app = flask.Flask(__name__)

    # ...

    blog_views = BlogViews()
    app.register_blueprint(build_blueprint(blog_views), url_prefix="/blog")

You can customise the blog through the following optional arguments:

    blog_views = BlogViews(
        blog_title="Blog",
        tag_ids=[1, 12, 112],
        exclude_tags=[26, 34],
        feed_description="The Ubuntu Blog Feed",
        per_page=12, # OPTIONAL (defaults to 12)
    )
    app.register_blueprint(build_blueprint(blog_views), url_prefix="/blog")

Django

• Add the blog module as a dependency to your Django project
• Load it at the desired path (e.g. "/blog") in the urls.py file

from django.urls import path, include
urlpatterns = [path("blog/", include("canonicalwebteam.blog.django.urls"))]

• In your Django project settings (settings.py) you have to specify the following parameters:

BLOG_CONFIG = {
    # the id for tags that should be fetched for this blog
    "TAGS_ID": [3184],
    # tag ids we don't want to retrieve posts from wordpress
    "EXCLUDED_TAGS": [3185],
    # the title of the blog
    "BLOG_TITLE": "TITLE OF THE BLOG",
    # [OPTIONAL] title seen on the RSS feed
    "FEED_DESCRIPTION": "The Amazing blog",
    # [OPTIONAL] number of articles per page (defaults to 12)
    "PER_PAGE": 12,
}

• Run your project and verify that the blog is displaying at the path you specified (e.g. '/blog')

Groups pages

• Group pages are optional and can be enabled by using the view canonicalwebteam.blog.django.views.group. The view takes the group slug to fetch data for and a template path to load the correct template from.
• Group pages can be filtered by category, by adding a category=CATEGORY_NAME query parameter to the URL (e.g. http://localhost:8080/blog/cloud-and-server?category=articles).

from canonicalwebteam.blog.django.views import group

urlpatterns = [
    url(r"blog", include("canonicalwebteam.blog.django.urls")),
    url(
        r"blog/cloud-and-server",
        group,
        {
            "slug": "cloud-and-server",
            "template_path": "blog/cloud-and-server.html"
        }
    )

Topic pages

• Topic pages are optional as well and can be enabled by using the view canonicalwebteam.blog.django.views.topic. The view takes the topic slug to fetch data for and a template path to load the correct template from.

urls.py

path(
		r"blog/topics/kubernetes",
		topic,
		{"slug": "kubernetes", "template_path": "blog/kubernetes.html"},
		name="topic",
),

Development

The blog extension leverages poetry for dependency management.

Regenerate setup.py

poetry install
poetry run poetry-setup

Testing

All tests can be run with poetry run pytest.

Regenerating Fixtures

All API calls are caught with VCR and saved as fixtures in the fixtures directory. If the API updates, all fixtures can easily be updated by just removing the fixtures directory and rerunning the tests.

To do this run rm -rf fixtures && poetry run pytest.