I've been sketching and brainstorming a blog concept idea over morning tea for awhile, trying to think of something good to present at Django-NYC and also use as a new blog engine for myself. I finally got my hands dirty a few nights ago and published Django-Mingus.

The project's name is Mingus, a Django powered blog engine available on github (previously hosted on bitbucket). Great, just what we need - another blog engine. Agreed. The overarching concept behind producing Django-Mingus is twofold though...

• An example project introducing reusable applications for a lightening talk at Django-NYC. Mingus itself leverages only existing reusable apps, and django-snippets. The project itself defines no models (db schemas).
• Mingus gives me a basic starting project for me to further develop, source code to reference during examples and therefore source code others can follow along with, creating opportunities to discuss various topics - deployment, integration, branding, etc. Essentially, unsupported characters, or include a non-local or incorrectly linked interwiki prefix. You may be able to locate the desired page by searching for its name (with interwiki prefix, if any) in the search box.

  Possible causes are:

  If you tried to access a non-local interwiki page, you may be able to access that page by clicking the "article" tab on this page.

  my own dog food and talking about it along the way.

It also comes with 5 default themes to choose from (really just varying color schemes). Those themes are: Basic, Dark, Django, Minimal, and JeffCroft. You can view screenshots of them over on flickr tagged 'mingustheme' .

Again, this is just a quick introductory post, a lengthier post will be published soon. For now, to play around with Mingus, take a quick peek at the quickstart guide posted in the wiki.

By no means is Django-Mingus complete. The templates need some love, there are usability enhancements available, etc. But details on that and more coming soon.