A New Beginning: Take Two
Django All The Way!
Back in October, I started an effort to port Wordpress-based websites over to Django. The reasoning was twofold:
- Wordpress is a pain to maintain. Constant PHP updates, security holes, and plugin hell.
- Agentic AI website development is better than good - it’s great.
The first point alone is wort the effort of porting, in my opinion. The second point is where things get REALLY interesting. Notably - adding new site functionality is no longer an effort in developing a Wordpress plugin. Instead, it’s a matter of having AI (Claude, in my case) creating Django features.
The initial blog port went well. In fact, I was very happy with the port that Claude made. I wasn’t terribly happy with having to check in every markdown file for a post, however.
The Updates
Having ported all my other website customers from Wordpress to Django, it seemed only prudent to include zimventures.com as one of the tenant sites....with a few tweaks.
Custom Blogging Platform
Zimventures.com now has a custom blogging platform, complete with an editor, image manager, and tagging system. The interface is simplistic, but functional.
Editor
I write posts in markdown, which are persisted to the database. During rendering the markdown is converted to HTML on the fly.
Preview Mode
The editor contains a preview mode. It allows the author (me!) to easily toggle between raw markdown and rendered markdown. The preview includes all images and code snippets. There will be many code snippets…
Image Manager
The image manager is very basic. It’s a modal that shows a catalog of images, allowing me to easily edit the alt tag and insert the images into posts - without having to remember the vagaries of the markdown image syntax.
Authentication
The underlying user system is based on Django’s auth system. However, the authenticated users for the CMS are tenant-specific. I also added 2FA support. Because security matters!
Resume Page
This was a good opportunity to refresh my online resume.
Next up
Webdevelopment
I’d like to add some analytics (for all the customer sites, not just Zimventures.com). My customers will appreciate having some basic analytics. All of the existing customer websites have been ported to the new platform - although some need to switch DNS A-records over. For all intents and purposes, the Wordpress-to-Django migration is complete.
Game Development
It’s time to get back on the game dev horse! While progress has been slow in December, it hasn’t stalled. I recently was able to get web builds working via emscripten. A lot of changes had to happen within the engine. As soon as the polish on that feature is complete, there will be some web demos.
First up: a web demo of the GUI system!
