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This is the debut post for the FreeCAD Development Blog, which provides a unique opportunity to bring the best FreeCAD development news and updates from the community of developers and users.

The blog uses the Python-based Nikola which provides an intuitive command-line interface (see nikola help after installation) and consumes reStructuredText files.

Custom themes are available, and standard CSS/JS customization is possible as well. Nikola supports \(\LaTeX\) equation rendering. It also has good multilingual support, key for FreeCAD's international community. Nikola also comes with RSS support out of the box, so readers of this site can subscribe for automatic updates.

You can contribute posts by following a few steps. First, visit the the repository for the blog source and click the "Fork" button. You can read about installing Nikola or (assuming you have pip) just run sudo apt install python3-pip && pip3 install --user -U nikola webassets ws4py watchdog. Then you need to clone your forked repository by running:

$ git clone https://github.com/<your-username>/freecad-blog && cd freecad-blog
$ nikola auto -b # Run autobuild and open an auto-refreshing browser window
$ nikola new_post # Follow the prompts and then edit posts/your_title.rst until satisfied
$ git add posts/your_title.rst # Begin the pull request process...

... and then finishing by making a pull request on the main repository using the commits you've pushed to your fork.

Once the pull request is merged, anyone with write permission to the repository for built pages can then use nikola build && nikola deploy to build and deploy the new post.