PyGrunn: live blogging with wagtail - Coen van der Kamp¶

Tags: pygrunn, python, django

(One of my summaries of a talk at the 2021 10th Dutch PyGrunn one-day python conference).

Wagtail (https://wagtail.io/) is a nice CMS layer on top of django and python. Wagtail is special in that it doesn’t have a build-in user-facing front end. You are invited to build your own that perfectly suits your needs. Wagtail is opinionated in that sense. It does have a nice admin interface for adding content.

Through google summer of code, an earlier idea he had on live blogging was added to wagtail. It is intended for live blogging a sports match, for instance. Lots of small messages.

It can grab input from slack or telegram. Of course, you can also use the admin interface or a REST api.

There is a bit of a workflow mechanism. You perhaps want to format the first line of an incoming message as a title.

There are multiple ways to set up the blog-viewing webpage. Interval polling, long polling, websockets. Websockets are the best option, but it takes more setup effort. Interval polling is the easiest option: just plain http.

https://wagtaillive.fourdigits.nl/pygrunn/ is where they do some test live blogging of this conference. The project lives at https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail-live