by Brandon Rhodes • Home

Sphinx + Mercurial = My favorite CMS

Date: 21 March 2010
Tags:computing, document-processing, python

Though I write and maintain some of the content for our Python Atlanta web site, updates and additional content often come in from other users. For example, our Plone interest group — headed up by Christopher Johnson — has their own page on our web site. And the information about our book club is both written and regularly updated by Doug Hellmann.

Python Atlanta web site

How can a collaborative site like ours best be edited and updated? Well, I would like to report some modest initial success with an experimental approach: I now maintain the site as a Sphinx-powered documentation system stored in a BitBucket repository into which I pull changes made by my collaborators. The advantages are several.

To top it all off, authors get to use their own editor-of-choice when making contributions, and we all get extra practice cloning and merging in my favorite DVCS. I am optimistic about this direction, but I will post again if we wind up hitting snags in the future. Finally, of course, feel free to clone our repository if you want to see how Sphinx looks when running a generic web site.

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