Minimalistic CMS blog with Flask

Dec 14, 2015 • 2 minutes to read • Last Updated: Dec 24, 2015

When I started writing this post, I was going to name it Writing a minimal Flask CMS app in 10 minutes, and an hour later I changed my mind.

Even though, I took an hour to write this app from scratch I am amazed at how quickly you can create a minimal CMS blog with Flask. All code for this project is on github, you can view it as we go through it.

If you don’t know Flask, it’s a python package that allows you to get started writing web apps in minutes. Initially it may have been a considered threat to Django, but I see it as a different beast. At work, we use it to write RESTful webservices around our internal packages but can be used to create a web apps around any of your python code.

Today, I am going to discuss about how to get started implementing a minimalistic CMS app. Most content management systems work around creating, editing, deleting and updating content. Most content is in HTML form. I wrote this app with the aforementioned assumption.

Directory structure

When writing a Flask app you will have a file to run your app, some html files in a templates directory and some python code(views.py) that binds the app to your html file. To store the content of the website we will be using a sqlite database.

.
├── app
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── templates
│   │   ├── edit-page.html
│   │   ├── index.html
│   │   ├── master.html
│   │   ├── new-page.html
│   │   └── page.html
│   └── views.py
├── cms.db  #sqlite database
├── requirements.txt
└── runserver.py

Views

The views.py contains the pages you would like the flask app to respond to, the connection to the database and SQLAlchemy table objects. I created views for the following pages:

Page	Route	Description
Index	/	This page will list all the blog posts.
Blog	/page/:id	This page shows the contents of a single page id.
Edit	/edit-page/:id	To edit a particular page id.
New	/new-page/	To create a new page.
Delete	/delete/:id	To delete a particular page id.

The database contains only one table, the Pages table that contains all the blog posts with fields id, title and content. The content field is a blob object that contains the HTML for any given page.

Conclusion

The application is pretty basic so I haven’t included basic authentication either. I use a <textarea> tag to include the content for a blog post which you can replace with light weight WYSIWYG editors if you like. For any other comments and suggestions please reply to this post, I would love to hear your thoughts & opinions. The source code is available on the following link.