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title:rst2wp: a ReStructuredText to Wordpress uploader

rst2wp is a Wordpress blogging client. It uses XML-RPC to upload posts.

The basic use case is to enable faster and more automatic blogging than is possible with the HTML/JS interface to Wordpress. To that end, you can use your favorite editor to write your posts, and then run rst2wp post.rst to get them online.

NOTE: rst2wp is not exactly deprecated but something close to it. If you are trying to pick a tool to use on your cool new blog idea, it would be hard for me to recommend this one. When this program was first written (in 2009), Wordpress seemed like a good way to publish a blog-like site with features like tags, RSS feeds, and search. In that environment, using rst2wp to facilitate writing posts as plain text in a git repository made perfect sense. In 2020, the landscape looks a lot different and it's hard to justify tying your site to Wordpress as an implementation choice. There's a whole category of "static site generators" and any of them will be better-maintained than rst2wp, to say nothing of whether your site really needs to be running Wordpress on the backend. In particular I've heard good things about Pelican. The rest of the documentation is targeted at existing users of rst2wp who are not motivated to move their entire site to something else.

Requirements

  • python-docutils
  • python-magic
  • python-pyxdg (not to be confused with xdg)
  • pillow
  • You probably also want exiftran from fbida

Features

  • The image:: directive has been customized to upload images using the WordPress API. You can give it any URL; if the image is non-local, it will be automatically downloaded using urllib.
  • Tags and categories are read from bibliographic fields at the top of the file. Many
  • Configuration by default goes in $HOME/.config/rst2wp/.

Shortcomings

  • Unicode filenames and other stuff haven't really been thought through. I just sprinkled some .encode('utf-8') calls here and there and things seem to work for me.

Getting started

  1. git clone https://github.com/glasserc/rst2wp.git
  2. cd rst2wp
  3. python setup.py install

Then just run rst2wp once to create ~/.config/rst2wp/wordpressrc. Account settings and configuration stuff goes in there.

Usage

Run rst2wp with the name of a post as its argument. The post is just an ordinary RST file, except that the (normally optional) bibliographic fields at the top of the file are required in order to provide a title to the post.

Here's a sample post:

:title: This is a brand new test!

This is just a test, of course. Here's an image:

|my_image|

I'd like to close with a quote:

    Four score and seven years ago..


.. |my_image| image:: http://travelogue.betacantrips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/tumblr_kqlgm7DjDq1qz59y9o1_500.gif
   :target: http://travelogue.betacantrips.com/

Once you run rst2wp on this file, the file will be modified. Particularly, you'll see:

:id: 362

in the bibliographic fields at the top, and in the image:: directive, you'll see:

:saved_as: http://travelogue.betacantrips.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/tumblr_kqlgm7DjDq1qz59y9o1_500.gif

In the future, this blog post will be altered instead of new ones being uploaded, and the uploaded image won't be re-uploaded.

You might find this annoying because you might have to re-load the file in your text editor, so this information is also saved in ~/.config/rst2wp. You can choose one or the other by editing config.data_storage.

Options

  • -n/--preview will open a browser (using $BROWSER) to let you "preview" the HTML you're generating.
  • -c/--config NAME may be of use to you if you maintain multiple blogs with rst2wp. At present it lets you use another name to look for configs (so you can search ~/.config/NAME instead of ~/.config/rst2wp), but in the future it may be more useful somehow.
  • --list-tags and --list-categories might be helpful, but WordPress will only show those that contain posts.

Config

The configuration file (by default $HOME/.config/rst2wp/wordpressrc) has several parameters:

  • config.data_storage = one of "file", "dotrc", or "both" (default is "file"). "dotrc" means to store URLs of uploaded images in ~/.config/rst2wp/images and ids of posts in ~/.config/rst2wp/posts. "file" means to store that information in the .rst file itself. "both" stores in both places, and generally trusts the file over the dotrc files.

    "file" is recommended, but in case you don't like rst2wp editing your files, "dotrc" is provided. Use "both" if you are indecisive.

    N.B.: if config.data_storage = "dotrc", the filename of the post is assumed to be unique across all blog posts. This means if you re-use a filename, you could potentially edit an existing blog-post. To help guard against this, FIXME: need to check if title is the same as what's in the dotrc, and if different, confirm.

  • config.publish_default = "yes" or "no" (default is yes). See "Publishing", below.

  • config.save_uploads = "yes" or "no" (default no). If true, all uploaded files are saved to an "uploads/" directory in the same directory as the post.

  • config.scale_images = [Not implemented yet.]

Publishing

Wordpress supports having posts that aren't yet published. There are many reasons you might do this -- for one, you might want to make sure rst2wp didn't make a hash of your post. Thus, rst2wp can mark a post "published" or not. This is controlled in several ways.

  1. If either of the --publish/--no-publish arguments are present, this has priority (--publish marks the post published; --no-publish marks the post as "unpublished").
  2. Otherwise, if the post has a bibliographic field called :publish: and it is set to "yes", the post is marked published.
  3. Otherwise, if the configuration parameter publish_default is set, the value of the parameter is used: "yes" marks the post published, "no" marks it as unpublished.
  4. Otherwise, the post is marked as unpublished.

Known Links

Over time you may find that you refer to some sites over and over again. ReST has a perfectly effective technique for this: defining external link targets. If you define a known_links file with the format:

[http://www.example.com/]
link = example link

Then you can use it freely in all your posts:

This is a link to `example link`_. Isn't ReST lovely?

Why ReStructuredText?

Because I like ReStructuredText.

Some people like Markdown. You can tell because they write about functions like gtkwindownew. Markdown started as a giant ball of regular expressions to create HTML and it hasn't changed much. It has grown extensions to address some shortcomings, but it isn't very extensible.

Additionally, I like the docutils codebase a lot -- it makes the kinds of customizations I made here very easy.

Notes on changing Wordpress's themes

Some CSS styles you might want to drop into your theme's style.css.

.line {
    min-height: 1em;
}