Weblog — a Persian blog platform built with Django

Weblog is a blogging platform I built with Django. It started as a way to practice a full content workflow end to end — writing posts, moderating comments, handling users — and grew into something closer to a small magazine, with an editorial review queue and a ticket-based support system on top.

The whole thing is RTL-first and designed around Persian content. The frontend is plain Django templates with vanilla CSS and JavaScript — no frontend frameworks — mostly because I wanted to understand how far you can get without them.

Stack: Django 6 · PostgreSQL · server-rendered templates · vanilla CSS/JS · Pillow

What it does

Writing and publishing

• Blog posts with a featured image, excerpt, tags, and an estimated reading time
• Categories in a parent → child tree, each with its own listing page
• Colored tags with their own pages and a tag cloud
• Search, a yearly archive, and "popular" / "recent" feeds
• An editorial workflow: a post moves through draft → pending → published (or rejected), and staff get a review queue to approve what's pending

Community

• Comments from both guests and registered users, with an active/inactive moderation flag
• User profiles with an avatar, cover image, bio, social links, and some live stats
• An author directory ranked by activity
• In-app notifications with an unread counter

Support

• A ticketing system with priorities, a four-stage status flow, and threaded staff/user replies
• A staff dashboard with content stats, pending-post approval, and the latest tickets

Look and feel

• Dark / light theme that remembers your choice
• Scroll-reveal animations, animated counters, ripple buttons, and a glassmorphism header
• Responsive layout with a mobile navigation drawer

The design leans on a single CSS-variable–driven stylesheet (static/css/style.css), so the whole site can be re-themed by editing one :root block. I took a lot of visual cues from Smashing Magazine — the signature red, the heavy headings, and the post cards that tilt slightly on hover.

Getting it running

You'll need Python 3.13+ and PostgreSQL running locally on port 5432.

git clone https://github.com/mohammadreza829/weblog.git
cd weblog

python -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate      # on Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Create the database (connection settings live in blog_project/settings.py under DATABASES — change the password before you put this anywhere real):

CREATE DATABASE blog_db;
CREATE USER blog_admin WITH PASSWORD '123456789';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE blog_db TO blog_admin;

Then migrate and run:

python manage.py migrate
python manage.py seed_demo    # optional — fills the site with demo content
python manage.py runserver

Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 and you should see a fully populated homepage.

Demo data

Since an empty blog is hard to judge, I wrote a seed_demo management command that fills the database with realistic Persian content in a few seconds:

python manage.py seed_demo
python manage.py seed_demo --posts 100 --users 20 --tickets 10

Option	Default	What it controls
--posts	48	Blog posts to generate
--users	10	Demo users
--tickets	10	Support tickets

It creates an admin superuser (if one doesn't exist), demo users with Persian names and bios, a handful of categories and colored tags, posts with SEO-friendly slugs and publish dates spread over six months, plus comments, ticket threads, and notifications. It's idempotent, so running it more than once won't create duplicates.

Project layout

weblog/
├── blog_project/     # settings, root URLconf, context processors
├── blog/             # posts, tags, dashboard, search, archive (+ the seed_demo command)
├── accounts/         # auth, profiles, notifications, author directory
├── categories/       # hierarchical categories
├── comments/         # comment submission & moderation
├── ticket/           # support tickets & replies
├── templates/        # base layout + all page templates
├── static/           # style.css (the whole design system) + main.js
└── media/            # user uploads, created at runtime

Each app is fairly self-contained: blog holds the post model with its status workflow, reading time, and view counter; accounts auto-creates a profile for every user via signals; categories is a self-referencing parent/child tree; comments handles guest and authenticated commenting; and ticket is the support side with its status flow and replies.

Default credentials

The seed_demo command sets these up for local development only:

Role	Username	Password
Admin	admin	admin1234
Demo users	user1 … userN	demo1234

Don't ship these — rotate them and set DEBUG = False before this goes anywhere public.

License

Released under the MIT License — feel free to use, modify, and learn from it.