Django Blog Pro

What's Included

Django Blog Pro is a complete, production-grade Django blogging platform with multi-author support, newsletters, analytics, comments, SEO, and everything you need to run a professional blog.

Requirements

Quick Start

1. Extract and set up

unzip django-blog-pro.zip
cd django-blog-pro
python -m venv venv && source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements/development.txt

2. Configure environment

cp .env.example .env

Edit .env with your settings:

SECRET_KEY=your-unique-secret-key-here
DEBUG=True
DATABASE_URL=sqlite:///db.sqlite3
REDIS_URL=redis://localhost:6379/0

3. Run migrations and seed data

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py seed_blog        # Load demo content
python manage.py createsuperuser  # Create admin account
python manage.py runserver

Visit:
- Blog: http://127.0.0.1:8000
- Admin Panel: http://127.0.0.1:8000/admin/
- API Docs: http://127.0.0.1:8000/api/docs/

Features

Core Blogging

• Multi-Author System — Author profiles with bios, avatars, social links, and archive pages
• Rich Content Editor — CKEditor 5 with image uploads, code blocks, and media embeds
• Content Scheduling — Draft, review, scheduled publish, and auto-expire workflows
• Series & Collections — Group related posts into ordered series with navigation
• Reading Time — Auto-calculated based on content length
• Table of Contents — Auto-generated from headings

Engagement

• Comment System — Threaded comments with moderation, spam filtering, and email notifications
• Newsletter — Built-in subscriber management with double opt-in and email campaigns
• Bookmarks — Authenticated users can save posts for later
• Social Sharing — One-click sharing with Open Graph and Twitter Card meta tags
• Reactions — Like/love/clap reactions on posts

Discovery & SEO

• Advanced Search — Full-text search with PostgreSQL, weighted fields, and suggestions
• Category & Tag System — Hierarchical categories with tag clouds
• Related Posts — Smart algorithm using tags, category, and content similarity
• SEO Toolkit — Meta descriptions, canonical URLs, JSON-LD structured data, XML sitemap, robots.txt
• RSS / Atom Feeds — Per-category and per-author feeds

Analytics & Performance

• View Tracking — Post view counts with unique visitor tracking (privacy-friendly)
• Reading Analytics — Track scroll depth and reading completion
• Popular Posts — Trending and most-read post widgets
• Image Optimization — Auto-resize, WebP conversion, and lazy loading
• Caching — Redis-backed page and fragment caching with invalidation

Developer Experience

• REST API — Full CRUD API for headless setups with Django REST Framework
• Management Commands — seed_blog, create_search_index, cache_warm
• Comprehensive Tests — 90%+ coverage with pytest
• Docker Ready — Dockerfile, docker-compose, and CI/CD pipeline configs
• Type Hints — Full type annotations throughout the codebase

Docker Setup

Development

docker compose up --build
docker compose exec web python manage.py migrate
docker compose exec web python manage.py seed_blog
docker compose exec web python manage.py createsuperuser

Production

docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml up --build -d
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml exec web python manage.py migrate
docker compose -f docker-compose.prod.yml exec web python manage.py collectstatic --noinput

Database Configuration

PostgreSQL (Recommended)

createdb blogpro_db

Update .env:

DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:password@localhost:5432/blogpro_db

Enable full-text search:

python manage.py create_search_index

Email Configuration

Development

Emails print to console by default.

Production (SMTP)

EMAIL_BACKEND=django.core.mail.backends.smtp.EmailBackend
EMAIL_HOST=smtp.mailgun.org
EMAIL_PORT=587
EMAIL_USE_TLS=True
EMAIL_HOST_USER=postmaster@yourdomain.com
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD=your-smtp-password
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL=blog@yourdomain.com

Supported: Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, Postmark, any SMTP provider.

Celery Workers

Celery handles newsletter sending, image optimization, search index updates, and analytics aggregation.

celery -A config worker -l info       # Start worker
celery -A config beat -l info         # Start scheduler
celery -A config worker -B -l info    # Both (dev only)

Running Tests

pytest                              # Run all tests
pytest --cov=apps --cov-report=html # With coverage report
pytest tests/blog/                  # Specific app tests

Production Deployment

Pre-deployment Checklist

python manage.py check --deploy
python manage.py collectstatic --noinput
python manage.py migrate

Environment Variables

DEBUG=False
SECRET_KEY=<strong-random-key>
ALLOWED_HOSTS=yourdomain.com,www.yourdomain.com
DATABASE_URL=postgres://user:pass@host:5432/dbname
REDIS_URL=redis://host:6379/0
SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT=True

Gunicorn

gunicorn config.wsgi:application --bind 0.0.0.0:8000 --workers 3 --timeout 120

Project Structure

django-blog-pro/
├── apps/
│   ├── blog/           # Core blog (posts, categories, tags, series)
│   ├── authors/        # Multi-author profiles
│   ├── comments/       # Threaded comment system
│   ├── newsletter/     # Subscriber & campaign management
│   ├── analytics/      # View tracking & reading stats
│   ├── search/         # Full-text search engine
│   ├── reactions/      # Post reactions
│   ├── bookmarks/      # User bookmarks
│   └── core/           # Shared utilities
├── config/
│   ├── settings/       # Split settings (base, dev, prod, test)
│   ├── urls.py
│   ├── celery.py
│   └── wsgi.py
├── templates/          # Django templates
├── static/             # CSS, JS, images
├── requirements/       # Pip requirements (base, dev, prod)
├── docker/             # Docker configs
├── tests/              # Test suite
└── docs/               # Extended documentation

Configuration Reference

Troubleshooting

"No module named 'psycopg2'" — Install with pip install psycopg2-binary

"Redis connection refused" — Check Redis is running: redis-cli ping

Static files not loading — Run python manage.py collectstatic --noinput

Search not working — Requires PostgreSQL. Run python manage.py create_search_index

Images not uploading — Check media directory permissions: chmod -R 755 media/

License

• Use in unlimited personal and commercial projects
• Modify and customize freely
• Deploy to production
• Do not resell or redistribute the source code
• Do not share outside your licensed team

Free updates for 12 months from purchase.

Django Blog Pro v1.0.0 — DjangoZen.com