Blog aggregation, static-website style!

.. image:: https://coveralls.io/repos/github/macbre/pelican-planet/badge.svg?branch=master :target: https://coveralls.io/github/macbre/pelican-planet?branch=master

This is a plugin for the Pelican_ static site generator.

It allows generating a page aggregating blog articles from other web sites.

.. _Pelican: https://getpelican.com

Usage

Install this plugin::

$ pip install git+https://framagit.org/bochecha/pelican-planet#egg=pelican_planet

Then, in your Pelican config file, enable the plugin::

PLUGINS = [
    ...
    'pelican_planet',
    ...
    ]

Next, declare the feeds you want to aggregate in your Pelican config file::

PLANET_FEEDS = {
    'Some amazing blog': 'https://example1.org/feeds/blog.atom.xml',
    'Another great blog': 'http://example2.org/feeds/blog.atom.xml',
    }

Write a Jinja2_ template for your aggregation page. For example, if the rest of your website is generated from Markdown pages, then create a planet.md.tmpl file with the following contents::

Some blogs aggregated here.

{% for article in articles %}
# {{ article.title }}

{% endfor %}

Finally, declare the template and destination page in your Pelican config file::

PLANET_TEMPLATE = 'planet.md.tmpl'
PLANET_PAGE = 'content/planet.md'

Then rebuild your website as usual using the pelican command line, and you should have your blog aggregation page.

You'll probably want to rebuild your website periodically though, maybe with a systemd timer or a cron job, to always fetch the latest articles in the feeds you aggregate.

.. _Jinja2: http://jinja.pocoo.org/

Template design

The template for your aggregation page will be passed an articles variable, containing the list of articles aggregated.

Each item of this list will have the following attributes:

• title: The title of the article;
• updated: The date at which the article was last updated, as a
  timezone-aware datetime object;
• author: The author of the article;
• link: The URL to the article on its original website;
• summary: The summary text of the article;
• feed_name: The name of the feed from which the article originated, as
  defined in the Pelican config file;

Optional configuration

You can have more control on the generated page, by setting a few more options in your Pelican config file:

• PLANET_MAX_ARTICLES: The maximum number of articles to show on the page.

  By default, all articles from all feeds will be added to the page.

• PLANET_MAX_ARTICLES_PER_FEED: The maximum of articles from a single feed ending on the page.

  By default all articles of a given feed are considered.

• PLANET_MAX_SUMMARY_LENGTH: The maximum number of words kept from the summary.

  By default the summary of the article will be the full text coming from the feed.

Legalities

pelican-planet is offered under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License, either version 3 or any later version_.

We will never ask you to sign a copyright assignment or any other kind of silly and tedious legal document before accepting your contributions.

In case you're wondering, we do not consider that a website built with pelican-planet would need to be licensed under the AGPL.

.. _GNU Affero General Public License, either version 3 or any later version: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html