A small social microblogging platform created on basis of the Flask Mega- Tutorial by Grinberg in Python 3.4.

You are welcome to try it out at http://socialmicroblog.herokuapp.com/ and follow my profile!

Next to basic features for a microblog like OpenID-login, create and delete posts, pagination, profile pages with (Gr)avatars, follow and unfollow users as well as email follower notifications, the platform includes the following extra features:

• Full text search with the Whoosh library (please see Known Issues below)

• Internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) through:

  • Multi-language support depending on the browser properties with the Babel package

  • Instant translations of blog posts in other languages by using Ajax calls with the Microsoft Translator service

• See requirements.txt

1. Clone this repository: git clone https://github.com/stueken/microblog.git and change into the application folder: cd microblog

2. If not done already, install the virtual environment package for Python 3.4: sudo apt-get install python3.4-venv

3. Create a virtual environment: python3 -m venv flask

4. Activate the virtual environment: source flask/bin/activate

5. Install all required packages: pip install -r requirements.txt

   Note: If you experience problems with installing the psycopg2-package in your virtual environment, run sudo apt-get install libpq-dev python-dev as explained in this post.

6. Configure email server and address(es) of the admin(s)

   1. Open the file config.py and fill email and admin information. For example, if you want the application to send emails via your GMail account you would enter the following:

      # email server
      MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.googlemail.com'
      MAIL_PORT = 465
      MAIL_USE_TLS = False
      MAIL_USE_SSL = True
      MAIL_USERNAME = os.environ.get('MAIL_USERNAME')
      MAIL_PASSWORD = os.environ.get('MAIL_PASSWORD')
      
      # administrator list
      ADMINS = ['[email protected]']

   2. MAIL_USERNAME and MAIL_PASSWORD are read from environment variables. Set them with export [email protected] and export MAIL_PASSWORD=your-mail-password. If you want to store your login credentials persistently, then place the mentioned commands in the ~/.profile-file.

   Note: In order to function with GMail, you need to login into your account and activate "Access for less secure apps".

7. Optional: Add additional language(s) (English and German already supported)

   1. Add the language to the list of available languages in config.py, e.g. Spanish:

      # available languages
      LANGUAGES = {
          'en': 'English',
          'de': 'Deutsch',
          'es': 'Español'
      }

   2. Add a language to the translation catalog, e.g. Español (language-code = es): ./tr_init.py es

   3. If not done already, install Poedit Translations Editor: sudo apt-get install poedit

   4. Run poedit, fill in the target language in catalog > properties, install the respective spellchecker directory if asked for, open the messages.po-file from the language folder, e.g. app/transaltions/es, add all translations and save the file.

   5. Compile the messages.po file: ./tr_compile.py

   6. Show timestamps in the target language as well. Open app/templates/base.html and add an 'elif'-statement to the header like shown here for Spanish (es):

      ...
      <script src="/static/js/moment-with-locales.min.js"></script>
      {% if g.locale == 'de' %}
          <script>moment.locale('de');</script>
      {% elif g.locale == 'es' %}
          <script>moment.locale('es');</script>
      {% else %}
          <script>moment.locale('en');</script>
      {% endif %}
      ...

   7. To check translation, modify the language settings in your browser so that like in this example Spanish is the preferred language.

8. Use Microsoft Translator service for instant translations

   1. To use the service, sign up for the free account at the Azure Marketplace

   2. Register your application and get a Client ID and Client Secret code

   3. Paste both in the respective place in config.py:

      # microsoft translation service
      MS_TRANSLATOR_CLIENT_ID = '' # enter your MS translator app id here
      MS_TRANSLATOR_CLIENT_SECRET = '' # enter your MS translator app secret here

9. Create the database: ./db_create.py

10. Start up the web server with the application in production mode:./runp.py and open http://127.0.0.1:5000 in your browser. Enjoy!

Run with ./command.py from root directory. If permission is denied, give it executable permission with $ chmod a+x command.py. The following are available:

• tbd

• The login with OpenID is limited to a Yahoo or AOL account as several providers (like Google) dropped their support for the OpenID-service.

• The full text search functionality is disabled on the demo url as the heroku server doesn't support mysqlite (file based) databases. Making the full text search work on a Postgresql database would require several changes to the application. It is planned to deploy a fully working demo to a Linux VPS.

• Deployment on nrbrt.com with full functionality
• Update user authentication to OAuth 2.0

Except of small adjustments and my documentation, the platform is based on the Flask Mega-Tutorial by Grinberg. The licence of the original source code applies to this repository as well: LICENSE.

Styleguides used:

• for Commits: Udacity Git Commit Message Style Guide
• for Markdown: Remark rules