I am hap­py to an­nounce the re­lease of ver­sion 5.3 of Niko­la a stat­ic blog/site gen­er­a­tor. It in­cludes some mi­nor fea­tures and a good amount of bug­fix­ing. Up­grad­ing to it should not cause you any trou­ble, as far as I know.

Here's the changel­og:

I am thrilled to an­nounce that you can now down­load Niko­la 5.2. a new ver­sion of my stat­ic blog/site gen­er­a­tor.

What's new in this ver­sion? A LOT. Don't let the mi­nor ver­sion tick fool you, this ver­sion is packed with good­ness. Let's start with fea­tures:

You can eas­i­ly em­bed more con­tent:

• New vimeo di­rec­­tive for re­struc­­tured tex­t.

• Cus­­tom "gist" di­rec­­tive pro­vid­ing re­Struc­­tured text sup­­port for GitHub gist­s.

You can write your con­tent in al­most any markup:

• Tex­tile markup sup­­port.

• Cre­ole Wi­­ki markup sup­­port.

• tx­t2­­tags markup sup­­port.

• bb­­code markup sup­­port.

• And of course, it still sup­­ports re­Struc­­tured tex­t, Mark­­down and HT­M­L.

More lan­guages:

• New Catalá tran­s­la­­tion

• New pol­ish tran­s­la­­tion.

• New Sim­­pli­­fied Chi­­nese tran­s­la­­tion.

• Use mul­ti­lin­gual Dis­­qus (although it does­n't seem to work)

You can im­port your data:

• New Blog­ger/Blogspot im­­porter

• Much im­proved Word­­press im­­porter

• Ex­­tract meta­­da­­ta from file­­name by us­ing reg­­exp (help­­ful for im­­port­ing from oc­­to­­press or oth­­er sys­tem­s).

You can do fanci­er and more con­fig­urable sites:

• One-­­page, dy­­nam­ic-load­­ing, clien­t-ren­dered site plug­in (task_­­mus­­tache)

• Re­cur­­sive post/s­­to­ry fold­ers

• New COM­­MENTS_IN_­­GAL­­LERIES and COM­­MENTS_IN_S­­TO­RIES op­­tion­s.

• Lo­­cal search based on Tipue (ex­­tra_­­plu­g­in­s/­­task_lo­­calsearch)

• Added com­­ments to im­age gal­­leries

• New op­­tion RSS_TEASERS

• New STO­RY_IN­DEX op­­tion to gen­er­ate in­­dex.html in sto­ry fold­er­s.

• Add mul­ti size fav­i­­con sup­­port.

You can use Python 2.6 or high­er ... in­clud­ing Python 3. The on­ly miss­ing bit for full Python 3 sup­port is Google sitemap gen­er­a­tion.

And of course, a lot of bugs got smashed:

• Added sane de­­faults for most op­­tion­s, so you can have a lean con­­fig file.

• Made lay­out of the site theme re­spon­­sive, with col­lap­s­ing navbar.

• Use time­­line in­­stead of pars­ing post_­­pages in gen­er­ic_­­page_ren­der­er and task_ren­der_­­pages.

• Up­­­dat­ed dis­­qus in­­te­­gra­­tion code, added iden­ti­­fiers so it works on any URL.

• Make sure fold­er links end in "/" in the gallery code.

• Re­­moved copy of PyRSS2­­Gen, made it a de­pen­­den­­cy.

• De­­tect "names­­pace" de­pen­­den­­cies for Mako tem­­plates.

• Use con­­sis­­tent en­­cod­ings in RSS feed­s.

• Refac­­tored dis­­qus code in­­­to sep­a­rate helpers

• Use the cor­rect ex­ten­­sion (or raise an er­ror) on new_­­post

• Fix ti­­tles that in­­­clude quotes

• Up­­­dat­ed to cur­rent CSS from do­cu­tils (was us­ing ver­­sion from 2005)

• Avoid need­­less re­­gen­er­a­­tion of gallery in­­dex­es.

• Al­ways en­­sure the fold­er for the new post ex­ist­s.

• Get ti­­tle from file­­name if not avail­able in meta­­da­­ta.

• Don't copy sources if they end in ".ht­m­l"

• Don't link to un­ex­ist­ing tran­s­la­­tion­s.

• Sort tags case in­­sen­si­­tive.

En­joy!

To­day at lunch, I added sup­port for im­port­ing blog­ger (maybe al­so blogspot? They seem to be the same nowa­days) blogs in­to Niko­la my stat­ic blog/site en­gine.

What works?

Well, the on­ly site I tried work­s, most­ly.

• Posts

• Pages

• Tags

• Drafts

• Blog Meta­­da­­ta (ex­­cept lan­guage)

• Redi­rects to keep URLs sta­ble (at least it tries re­al­­ly hard!)

• URL rewrit­ing in the posts (it tries!)

What's not there?

• Com­­ments im­­port (it makes more sense to im­­port them via Dis­­qus' im­­port tool)

• At­­tach­­ments (im­ages and such)

• Much test­ing

It's ba­si­cal­ly on par with the Word­press im­port, ex­cept noone has used it for re­al. So, feel free to try!

(It's niko­la im­port_blog­ger name_of_the_­dump.xm­l)

Just for com­plete­ness' sake I have gone over Wikipedi­a's list of light­weight markup lan­guages and added sup­port in Niko­la (a stat­ic site and blog gen­er­a­tor) for a cou­ple of them: BB­Code and tx­t2­tags, which brings the num­ber of sup­port­ed markup for­mats to 7 (the oth­ers are re­Struc­tured tex­t, mark­down, HTM­L, tex­tile and Wik­i).

Of the list of markup lan­guages, the on­ly miss­ing ones with a Python im­ple­men­ta­tion are Asci­iDoc and Mark­down Ex­tra.

Why both­er with this? It's not as if there was some­one ask­ing for BB­Code sup­port. How­ev­er, one of the us­es I want to sup­port is ar­chiv­ing sites. Sup­pose you have a fo­rum you want to shut down? I want you to be able to ar­chive it (even if it's some work) and keep the da­ta out there. A wik­i? Same thing.

This is a first step in that di­rec­tion.