I am happy to announce the release of Nikola version 5.3. It includes some minor features and a good amount of bugfixing. Upgrading to it should not cause you any trouble, as far as I know.

Here's the changelog:

I am thrilled to announce that you can now download Nikola 5.2.

What's new in this version? A LOT. Don't let the minor version tick fool you, this version is packed with goodness. Let's start with features:

You can easily embed more content:

• New vimeo directive for restructured text.

• Custom "gist" directive providing reStructured text support for GitHub gists.

You can write your content in almost any markup:

• Textile markup support.

• Creole Wiki markup support.

• txt2tags markup support.

• bbcode markup support.

• And of course, it still supports reStructured text, Markdown and HTML.

More languages:

• New Catalá translation

• New polish translation.

• New Simplified Chinese translation.

• Use multilingual Disqus (although it doesn't seem to work)

You can import your data:

• New Blogger/Blogspot importer

• Much improved Wordpress importer

• Extract metadata from filename by using regexp (helpful for importing from octopress or other systems).

You can do fancier and more configurable sites:

• One-page, dynamic-loading, client-rendered site plugin (task_mustache)

• Recursive post/story folders

• New COMMENTS_IN_GALLERIES and COMMENTS_IN_STORIES options.

• Local search based on Tipue (extra_plugins/task_localsearch)

• Added comments to image galleries

• New option RSS_TEASERS

• New STORY_INDEX option to generate index.html in story folders.

• Add multi size favicon support.

You can use Python 2.6 or higher ... including Python 3. The only missing bit for full Python 3 support is Google sitemap generation.

And of course, a lot of bugs got smashed:

• Added sane defaults for most options, so you can have a lean config file.

• Made layout of the site theme responsive, with collapsing navbar.

• Use timeline instead of parsing post_pages in generic_page_renderer and task_render_pages.

• Updated disqus integration code, added identifiers so it works on any URL.

• Make sure folder links end in "/" in the gallery code.

• Removed copy of PyRSS2Gen, made it a dependency.

• Detect "namespace" dependencies for Mako templates.

• Use consistent encodings in RSS feeds.

• Refactored disqus code into separate helpers

• Use the correct extension (or raise an error) on new_post

• Fix titles that include quotes

• Updated to current CSS from docutils (was using version from 2005)

• Avoid needless regeneration of gallery indexes.

• Always ensure the folder for the new post exists.

• Get title from filename if not available in metadata.

• Don't copy sources if they end in ".html"

• Don't link to unexisting translations.

• Sort tags case insensitive.

Enjoy!

I am happy to announe release 5.1 of Nikola a static site/blog generator.

A new version of Nikola is out! You can get it at the usual place.

This version is not completely backwards compatible, thus the new major version number, but switching to it should be easy-ish. If you are using version 4.0.3:

1. Remove your dodo.py

2. Use nikola build instead of doit from now on

3. use nikola serve instead of doit serve, nikola new_post instead of doit new_post, and so on. Some other doit task are also converted into nikola command you can get the list using nikola help

The integration of doit into Nikola is not done in a very nice way, that's still ongoing work, but it should be Good Enough To Work (TM).

Hope you enjoy this release!

Version 4.0.3 is released

This is strictly a bugfix release, which fixes the following issues:

• Handle empty posts without crashing.

• Treat wordpress imported posts as Markdown.

• Download attachments from wordpress

• Fix links to attachments so they work

• Change the global/local order of contexts on templates.

• Link tag's feed in tag's pages.

• Fix empty tag feeds.

• Refactored Post out of nikola.py

New bugfix release available for download. Here are the changes in this version:

Every release has bugs, this one has a couple fewer than the last one!

Get it at the usual place

I have just uploaded release 4 of Nikola. Here are some of the changes in this version:

One of the most important things when you are building a static site generator like Nikola is that your site should not be broken. So, I really should have done this earlier ;-)

This is a very simple link checker that ensures the pages Nikola generates have no broken links. I will make it part of Nikola proper once it's more polished and doit supports getting a list of targets

To try it, get it and run it from the same place where you have your conf.py, right after you run doit.

import os
import urllib
from urlparse import urlparse

import lxml.html

def analyze(filename):
    try:
        # Use LXML to parse the HTML
        d = lxml.html.fromstring(open(filename).read())
        for l in d.iterlinks():
            # Get the target link
            target = l[0].attrib[l[1]]
            if target == "#":  # These are always valid
                continue
            parsed = urlparse(target)
            # We only handle relative links.
            # TODO: check if the URL points to inside the generated
            # site and check it anyway
            if parsed.scheme:
                continue
            # Ignore the fragment, since the link will still work
            # TODO: check that the fragment is valid
            if parsed.fragment:
                target = target.split('#')[0]
            # Calculate what file or folder this points to
            target_filename = os.path.abspath(
                os.path.join(os.path.dirname(filename), urllib.unquote(target)))
            # Check if it exists, or report it
            if not os.path.exists(target_filename):
                print "In %s broken link: " % filename, target
    except Exception as exc:
        # Something bad happened, report
        print "Error with:", filename, exc

# This is hackish: we use doit to get a list of all
# generated files. Minor modifications would let you check
# the non-generated files as well.

for task in os.popen('doit list --all', 'r').readlines():
    task = task.strip()
    if task.split(':')[0] in (
        'render_tags',
        'render_archive',
        'render_galleries',
        'render_indexes',
        'render_pages',
        'render_site') and '.html' in task:
            # It looks like a generated HTML file
            analyze(task.split(":")[-1])

A fast-loading site is a good thing. Your site's speed matters. Which is why creating fast sites is one of Nikola's design goals.

Sure, it's not meant to create e-commerce sites, but if you are doing just a simple corporate site, or a personal blog, why would you not make it as fast as possible anyway?

So, here's one data point, from Kay Hayen

But you don't have to just believe that graph. Here's Yahoo's YSlow report on my personal blog, which is hosted in a $5 VPS (as is this site, BTW. The same VPS. As is a bunch of services. And my Quassel core)

It scores 94 on that test. That's 94 out of 100 possible points in the "Small Site or Blog" ruleset.

How much server tuning was needed? I added one line to the Apache config:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css

That makes it compress those files before sending it to the user and improved the third item from F to A.

So, when I say Nikola makes your site fast, don't take my word for it, just check it out.