Backwards
Licence: MIT.
Backwards is a simple file system driven CMS developed using Nevow. Its use case is precisely that of puzzling.org: a tree-structured site with breadcrumbs, custom directory indices, and RSS feeds at each level.
Dependencies: Python 2.4 or greater, Twisted 2.2 or greater and Nevow 0.6, Python Imaging Library. Dependencies will in general roughly match versions in the latest Ubuntu release.
Backwards currently has three modules that generate different parts of puzzling.org:
- stationary
- Backwards Stationary uses a set of files containing RFC822-style headers and index files in a directory tree to generate pages.
- mirror
- Backwards Mirror is loosely based on PicturePile Plus (which itself was designed to be much like album), and uses a directory structure containing images and caption files to generate a photo album. It also uses the Python Imaging Library to generate thumbnails. You can see it in action at puzzling dot org : photos
- consecutive
- Backwards Consecutive uses a single directory containing YYYYMMDD source files, to generate a log like Puzzlement.
- pad
- A links blog
Status
Backwards should be considered alpha: poorly tested, potentially buggy, and undocumented. At present, you should probably be willing to learn some Nevow in order to get it to run at all.
Getting Backwards
There's a nightly tarball of Backwards available, and it's also in Bazaar 2.0 revision control (I'm finally saving myself from the pain of GNU Arch).
Alpha releases
These still need to be pulled from bzr:
Latest alpha (0.0.3)
Released 22nd June 2006. Designed to work with Twisted 2.2 and Nevow 0.6
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hypatia/backwards/0.0.3
0.0.2 (alpha)
Released 4th June 2006. Designed to work with Twisted 2.2 and Nevow 0.6
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hypatia/backwards/alpha
0.0.1 (alpha)
Released 13th October 2005. Designed to work with Twisted 2.0.1 and Nevow 0.4
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hypatia/backwards/0.0.1
Development branch
The devel branch is the one that puzzling.org runs on at any given time. It therefore actually works. There's a nightly tarball available.
bzr branch http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~hypatia/backwards/unstable
Todo/bugs
See the bug tracker.
Last modified: 22 June 2006