Running Mezzanine on App Engine

Question

I am looking for a blog solution to run inside a Django project deployed on the Google App Engine. After a bit of review I decided to try out Mezzanine v0.11.3. I've overcome the hurdle of getting it in project using the advice of others deploying on App Engine at this link: http://groups.google.com/group/mezzanine-users/browse_thread/thread/c8b13c41a3168c94.

Mezzanine is now showing up in the Admin, but clicking on Blog posts leads to a multi-table inheritance failure. I believe that this is due to multi-site support functionality in Mezzanine via use of the Django sites framework.

Has anyone overcome this issue? I'm going to try to use django-dbindexer but I'm not confident it will work.

*Update: as far as I can tell, the folks at AllButtonsPressed don't have any magic solutions to work around ManyToManyField issues yet, so I think that option is dead.

If no one knows a work around, do any of you know of a good blog solution I can run inside a Django project on the App Engine?

*Update: found this post Integrating Blogger into a Google App Engine App. Will investigate if this solves the problem.

*Current Status: I have not been able to solve this problem and I don't think it is currently solvable. Thought I would share what I found through my investigations though; maybe someone out there can carry on and come up with a solution.

Options tried:

Bloog

• I looked this over but it is a Python solution, not a Django solution and I didn't want to do the work to turn it into one

Byteflow ( https://bitbucket.org/piranha/byteflow/wiki/Home ) notes:

• designed to be standalone, will need a lot of edits to settings.py, inclusion of 12 additional apps and overrides on account settings plus hand tuning at every upgrade.

AppEngineBlog ( http://code.google.com/p/appengineblogsoftware/ ) notes:

• written in appengine specific code, not maintained, no example sites available to see how it looks

Coltrane ( http://code.google.com/p/coltrane-blog/source/browse/ ):

• simple blog constructed from standard Django functionality no development or support, basically need to use this code as a way to develop your own blog and go from there

Flother ( https://github.com/flother/flother ):

• found via Coltrane comments, probably embeddable without too much trouble, requires 8 additional apps,the photos and places components have ManyToManyFields that would have to be re-written or these components disabled

Blogger API ( http://code.google.com/apis/blogger/ ):

• use Blogger at whatever location you wish to gain fully functional blogging capabilities, then use Blogger API to deliver content to any other site you wish to display it

Flother came close to what I need but there is still a fair bit of uncertainty and effort there. I'm proceeding with the Blogger option as the only viable choice for me at this time.

Answer 1

Well, as far as I can see, there is no way to get Mezzanine running on GAE other than wading into the code and ripping out anything relating to a ManyToManyField (Sites support, Photos and ... something else. Can't remember what).

The only thing I could find out there that has the potential to be added to an existing project, uses only portable Django code (app engine specific) and runs on App Engine is http://www.allbuttonspressed.com/projects/allbuttonspressed . I haven't actually tried to integrate it yet because I'm going to see if the Blogger solution works.

Answer 2

I've been using bloog for two of my blogs without any serious troubles so far - there are few little quirks that make it mildly unpleasant sometimes but nothing that's been a deal breaker.