I’ve been struggling with Python’s distutils over the weekend, and I’m finally making some progress. There’s a new GeekWeaver page and a new release.

The page is part of a revamp of my personal site, which is now being built with GeekWeaver. And the release is the first built with distutils.

I was hoping that it would put the code somewhere on the PATH so that you can include the GeekWeaver modules from anywhere, but that doesn’t seem to be happening. So although the code goes into “site-packages” I’m not sure what that buys you at present. Any Python experts able to shed some light on this?

What’s definitely happened is I tidied up the whole directory structure. Unit tests and library modules are in sub-directories, and you can run the program from wherever you like as long as you give the right path to the gwMain program.

If you go into the “examples” directory in this new distribution, you’ll see some examples of .bat and .opml files. You should be able to run the .bat directly there. You can put your own projects in their own separate directories using this as a model.

As always, I’m keen to have feedback, questions and suggestions for GeekWeaver. It’s starting to come together although I also need some proper docs and screencasts to really show what it’s capable of. The example files show the most basic (but most useful) features of GeekWeaver, the fact you’re using an outliner for your whole site, the fact you can manage multiple pages within the same file, the way you can use .< notation to save yourself having to close tags, and the definition of re-usable, parameterisable blocks. There’s a more complex example of GeekWeaver’s power in the tests sub-folder. It’s not that well explained yet, but it shows how you can produce tables, how you can map a block-call to a sub-list of items, define blocks which are bigger than a single page, and pass block-names as parameters to other blocks.