eatStatic is Dead, long live eatStatic

I was pleased to see people recently enthusing on twitter about text-file based blog and CMS tools – nesta CMS, Kirby and scriptogr.am, as it validated my theory that there is a demand for tools like these – I was met with fairly bemused looks when i’ve explained the concept to people in the past!.
I was also slightly annoyed with myself for not pushing my own text file based blogging system more and taking it further, as maybe people could have been getting excited about my project instead. It seems fairly pointless to develop it further now when these other tools exist, and i’d already decided to park it last year. My other reason for halting development on it was because it is written in PHP, and i’m determined to concentrate my efforts on django and python for personal projects.

Whilst at New Adventures in web design conference on thursday, I was feeling inspired to create something, so thought maybe I should build a django version of one of these systems. For a crazy second there I thought maybe I would be the first person to think of this, so I did about 30 seconds research and found that Luis Pedro has already created a django text file based blog/ CMS called Git CMS. It looks great, so my first reaction was that I should fork it and develop some of my other ideas around it, but then I noticed that he is still using a database, with a sync script to populate Django models from the text files. This is actually a very sensible way of doing it as it means that you can take advantage of all the stuff you get for free in django. However, my initial goal for eatStatic was to avoid the need for a database at all..

So i’ve decided to do a more or less straight port of eatStatic blog engine to python – a standalone text file blog engine implemented as a python library, that can be dropped into a django project, or any other python web framework, with little or no configuration. I’ve given myself an initial goal of moving this blog over to it as soon as it is stable, but then I want to take it further, and do some marketing around it – encourage people to try it, and to fork it, join me in my quest for a really fast, really simple, really portable, really powerful python powered database-less blog and cms. As soon as I have the initial code ready, and am convinced it isn’t too embarrassing i’ll get it up on gitHub alongside the PHP version 🙂