grahambinns.com

A few months back, when I was on a Launchpad Bugs sprint in Vilnius, Tom and Gavin asked me whether I'd thought about open-sourcing the engine that runs grahambinns.com. My answer then was that I'd thought about it but never done it because:

1. It wasn't very good
2. The code had a lot of grahambinns.com-specific code in it
3. It wasn't very good.

It's still not very good, but I've removed all the grahambinns.com specifics and now I'm reasonably happy to announce (like the father of a slightly ill-coordinated child) Frabjous version 0.1, "Not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable", is now available for download under the GPLv3 at launchpad.net.

Some questions and answers:

• Q: Why 'Frabjous'?
  A: Because I was reading Jabberwocky at the time I was trying to think up a name.
• Q: Should I replace my Wordpress installation with Frabjous?
  A: Emphatically no, unless you really, really want to. Frabjous is, for all that I've removed a lot of the me-specific code, pretty awkward to adminster just yet (well, I think it is). Wordpress is as good as it is because it's very mature; Frabjous isn't.
• Q: Do you want Frabjous to be a Wordpress killer?
  A: Not really. I want it to be better than it is at the moment and I'd like people to use it, but Wordpress is a fantastic piece of software and people will doubtless find it easier to use and set up than Frabjous for quite a while.
• Q: That being the case, why do you use Frabjous rather than Wordpress?
  A: I originally wrote what would become Frabjous because I wanted to learn Django. I also had a cordial dislike for PHP after years of working in it and wanted never to have to run it on a server of mine ever again. So far, I'm succeeding.

So, please go and try it out. You can grab the trunk from Launchpad using bzr branch lp:frabjous; please feel free to have a look at the code, hack on it and file bugs. Patches welcome, branches even better.

For the record, I have no illusions that anyone other than me will ever use this code, especially with so many other blogging and site management platforms available. However, you can always treat it as a learning exercise, and that's fine too.