In the past weeks I was playing around with byteflow to prepare my own theme and set it up properly. To have it running was really simple, I only had to take care of the /media/, /static/ and /admin-media/ urls to Alias them properly. Otherwise everything went like charm!

After I’ve looked at its admin panel to learn what can I do. The only big mystery was the textblocks app, but after I’ve found some other useful stuff as well.

Textblocks

Even though it’s easy to create a textbox, it is not that straightforward how to show it on your sites. Unfortunately, the only way to do it is to edit your template and add the corresponding template tag at the proper place.

I really find this unsatisfactory as this doesn’t allow flexibility like having one textblock besides one post and a different with a different post. Might be that one day I’ll add this functionality. But let’s get back to the question how to use it?

Simply add the {% text_block “block_code” %} tag to your template. This will show a block named block_code. That’s it!

How many posts on one page?

As I expect to have a relatively crowded startpage, I don’t want many posts there. So I digged into the byteflow code and found that by overwritting settings.PAGINATE_BY I can set it in general.

But what if I would like to have let’s say 5 posts on a tag-list but only 2 on my homepage? Actually for more fine tuned settings I’ll have to overwrite the info variable in blog/urls.py. This is not a nice thing, but AFAIK this is the only way to do it.

Directory pings

One thing I found really hard to find in Byteflow were directory pings. Actually, they are in the settings.py file and set by default to False. You can see the default list of directories to ping there as well. Actually, I extended it a little bit.