Tonight I released/open-sourced ShiftingBits. This blog is still on WordPress, but I believe I am close to having the all the features I need/require to make the migration possible.

I pretty much stole a bunch from Brian Rosner's oebfare code base so if any of it looks familiar, that's where I copied a lot of this from. Thanks, Brian!

If you are wanting to move from a WordPress blog to your own Django-based site, you might be able to save some time with this blog engine. This is exactly the path I am taking.

I am using:

• mootools 1.2 -- JavaScript library awesomeness
• blueprint -- CSS framework
• wmd -- Live markdown preview for comments
• prettify -- Really cool syntax highlighter

Feature Summary:

• Basic blog post mode driven using generic date based views with redirects so that the WordPress url date format (numbered month versus the prettier and django default of short month name) get mapped properly so that none of your links break.
• WordPress to Django Migration Script
• Tagging via django-tagging
• Comments via the new django.contrib.comments and using the live markdown preview editor, wmd.
• Full RSS feeds (both latest feeds and by tag)

Left to To:

• Implement an XML-RPC interface that Mars Edit can communicate with.
• Add Google Analytics
• Clean up CSS so that the templates look better.
• Handle Trackbacks/Pingbacks

This is the code that I am planning to use shortly here at paltman.com, including the css/templates. I would love to hear feedback from the community on the code and/or approach taken.