New Feature in django-articles: Articles From Email

One of the features that I really like about sites like posterous and tumblr is that they allow you to send email to a special email address and have it be posted as a blog article. This is a feature I've been planning to implement in django-articles pretty much since its inception way back when. I finally got around to working on it.

The latest release of django-articles allows you to configure a mailbox, either IMAP4 or POP3, to periodically check for new emails. A new management command check_for_articles_from_email can be used to process the messages found in the special mailbox. If any emails are found, they will be fetched, parsed, and posted based on your configuration values. Only articles whose sender matches an active user in your Django site will be turned into articles. You can configure the command to mark such articles from email as "inactive" so they don't appear on the site without moderation. The default behavior, actually, is to mark the articles inactive--you must explicitly configure django-articles to automatically mark the articles as active if you want this behavior.

One of the biggest things that you should keep in mind with this new feature, though, is that it does not currently take your attachments into account. In time I plan on implementing this functionality. For now, only the plain text content of your email will be posted. Please see the project's README for more information about this new feature.

Please keep in mind that this is brand new functionality and it's not been very well tested in a wide variety of situations. Right now, it's in the "it works for me" stage. If you find problems with it, please create a ticket or update any similar existing tickets using the ticket tracker on bitbucket.org.

You can install or update django-articles using the following utilities:

• pip install -U django-articles
• easy_install -U django-articles
• hg clone http://bitbucket.org/codekoala/django-articles/ or just hg pull -u if you have already cloned it
• git clone git://github.com/codekoala/django-articles.git

Enjoy!

P.S. This article was posted via email