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 revision control.

Alpha releases

These still need to be pulled from bzr:

Latest alpha (0.0.4)

Released 13th July 2008. Fixes common HTTP response problems and rendering errors with 304 return codes

Release history

The alpha branch merges in all alpha releases:

Releases were:

• 0.0.3: released 22nd June 2006. Designed to work with Twisted 2.2 and Nevow 0.6
• 0.0.2: released 4th June 2006. Designed to work with Twisted 2.2 and Nevow 0.6
• 0.0.1: released 13th October 2005. Designed to work with Twisted 2.0.1 and Nevow 0.4

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.

Todo/bugs

See the bug tracker.