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.

Installation

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

pip3 install canonicalwebteam.blog

See also the documentation for pip install.

Usage

Local development

For local development, it's best to test this module with one of our website projects like ubuntu.com. For more information, follow this guide (internal only).

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.

Usage

In your app you can then do the following:

import flask
import talisker.requests
from flask_reggie import Reggie
from canonicalwebteam.blog import BlogViews, build_blueprint, BlogAPI

app = flask.Flask(__name__)
Reggie().init_app(app)
session = talisker.requests.get_session()

blog = build_blueprint(
    BlogViews(
        api=BlogAPI(session=session),
    )
)
app.register_blueprint(blog, url_prefix="/blog")

You can customise the blog through the following optional arguments:

blog = build_blueprint(
    BlogViews(
        blog_title="Blog",
        blog_path="blog",
        tag_ids=[1, 12, 112],
        exclude_tags=[26, 34],
        per_page=12,
        feed_description="The Ubuntu Blog Feed",
        api=BlogAPI(
            session=session,
            use_image_template=True,
            thumbnail_width=330,
            thumbnail_height=185,
        ),
    )
)

Testing

All tests can be run with ./setup.py test.

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 && ./setup.py test.