Status Update for LifeFlow

lifeflow (20)

I have been hacking away at LifeFlow for a bit, and I figured how would be a good time to discuss where LifeFlow is, and where it is going.

Recent Changes

  1. Support for attaching Authors to entries. 0+ authors can be assigned to each entry. Each author has their own biographical page.
  2. Added a feed for comments.
  3. Added a dynamic front page (display recent comment(s), four most recent posts, and content from twitter).
  4. Added feeds for all tags (so a feed for 'django', and for 'common lisp', and for 'japan').
  5. Added feeds for all article series. If you only want to know about the Two-Faced Django series, then thats fine with me.

Where Does That Leave Us?

At this point LifeFlow is a fairly full featured blogging solution, but it needs some helpful documentation. How do you install LifeFlow? (Its a Django app, so just include its urls.py into your project) What libraries is it dependent on? (Pygments) What do you need to do to set things up? (Make an Author, at least one Flow, at least one Project if you want to have the projects page work.) What version of Django does it run under? (Any relatively current SVN checkout.)

These questions need to be answered.

The other two big flaws are:

  1. The commenting system requires a serious reworking.
  2. The default templates are woefully out of date, and essentially need to be salvaged from catastrophy.

A Light?

But relax my fair friends, all is not lost. Here is my current roadmap into the future.

  1. Rework commenting model, integrate new model into LifeFlow.
  2. Write a new batch of default templates using BluePrint for CSS.
  3. Write a battery of tests.
  4. Write a guide for setting up a development deployment.
  5. Write a guide for setting up LifeFlow in a production environment.

That is my current short-term map. My longer term roadmap:

  1. Push project out to Google Code.
  2. Release a stable snapshot that works with Django 1.0 (or 2.0, depending on what it ends up being titled).
  3. Continue packaging stable LifeFlow releases to coincide with each official Django release.