Magnolia

Magnolia is a Django-based blogging engine.

Features

• Rich-text post formatting using the block editor
• Posts tagging
• SEO-friendly URLs
• Searching of posts
• Drafts
• Featured posts
• RSS syndication
• Blog avatar and cover in the page header
• Social contacts
• Pagination

Running locally

The following guide is for local development only.

0. Install Python 3.12+ and Node.js 24+.

1. Clone repo:

git clone https://github.com/iriscot/magnolia-blog
cd magnolia-blog

2. Create and enter a Python environment:

python3 -m venv blog_env
source blog_env/bin/activate

3. Install Python dependencies:

python -m pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Install frontend dependencies and build CSS:

npm install
npm run build-css

5. Configure local environment variables:

export DJANGO_DEBUG=True

6. Apply database migrations:

python manage.py migrate

7. Run the local server:

python manage.py runserver

8. Open http://127.0.0.1:8000.

Production configuration

Set production secrets and hosts with environment variables instead of editing settings.py:

• DJANGO_SECRET_KEY - required when DJANGO_DEBUG is false;
• DJANGO_DEBUG - set to False or leave unset in production;
• DJANGO_ALLOWED_HOSTS - comma-separated host names;
• DJANGO_CSRF_TRUSTED_ORIGINS - comma-separated trusted origins, including scheme;
• DJANGO_DB_ENGINE and DJANGO_DB_NAME - database engine and database name/path;
• DJANGO_TIME_ZONE - default timezone;
• POSTS_PER_PAGE - posts displayed per page;
• MAX_UPLOAD_SIZE and MAX_REMOTE_IMAGE_SIZE - upload limits in bytes;
• DJANGO_SECURE_SSL_REDIRECT, DJANGO_SECURE_HSTS_SECONDS, DJANGO_SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE, DJANGO_CSRF_COOKIE_SECURE - HTTPS-related security options.

Translation

Magnolia is available in English and Russian out of the box. You can create your own translations:

django-admin makemessages -l [YOUR_LOCALE_CODE]
django-admin makemessages -l [YOUR_LOCALE_CODE] -d djangojs