This post is an introduction to Firmant. Firmant is a relatively young blogging framework useful for hosting your own weblog.

Firmant is written in Python with a minimal set of external dependencies. Dependencies include:

• werkzeug for URL routing and Request/Response objects.
• etree (either lxml, cetree, or Python 2.5).
• simplejson or Python 2.6.
• markdown for the Markdown filtering subsystem.
• Jinja2 for template rendering.
• pytz for timezone handling.

Not all dependencies are used in all situations, but at the current point in time, they are required to pass unit tests. Firmant's design makes it very likely that the dependency set listed above will only shrikn for the average installation.

Future plans for Firmant include rounding out the feature set of Firmant to include a more polished set of features. Notably absent is pagination of pages, multiple choices for markup language, comments, and easier navigation for pre-built templates.

So just how usable is Firmant? At this point it is functional. There aren't many functions, but those that exist are well tested. Our code base includes a large number of unit tests that must pass with each new release. While not everything is tested, our large code-coverage decreases the likelihood that severe bugs will work their way into the system.

In the next few weeks, documentation will be rounded out and I will be writing articles walking through the motivations behind Firmant, my goals, and the actual architecture.

If you're looking to help out, email me or catch me on AIM (robescriva) and chat.

If you can read this, Firmant's master branch is functional on CentOS 5.