Alligator Bot is a Slack bot that serves as a mini-CMS for the Independent Florida Alligator, a student-run newspaper in Gainesville, Florida. Editors or reporters drop a Markdown file into a designated Slack channel, have it converted to HTML and thrown into an HTML template, and have it uploaded to the Alligator's SFTP server. The bot accepts images as well.
Alligator bot uses Slack's python developer kit to connect to the Alligator's slack and Slack's python slack events API to listen for any file, photos or messages that is intended for Alligator bot.
As mentioned above, the bot converts markdown to HTML. Alligator bot uses Python Markdown to do this conversion. It uses Jinja to throw that converted file into a template that includes all the necessary head elements to connect to style sheets for the story to look good.
After the file is converted and formatted with a template, it needs to be uploaded to the Alligator's SFTP server. To do this, we used Paramiko. Once completed, the bot copies the destination folder's name and appends it to the end of "alligator.org/". The bot takes this formatted URL and posts a message to the editor or reporter so that they see that everything worked.