Chapter 9. Excellent Extensions

In this chapter, we will learn about enhancing our Flask install with some popular third-party extensions. Extensions allow us to add extra security or functionality with very little effort and can polish your blogging app nicely. We will investigate Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection for your forms, Atom feeds so others can find your blog updates, adding syntax highlighting to the code that you use, caching to reduce the load when rendering templates, and asynchronous tasks so that your app doesn't become unresponsive when it is doing something intensive.

In this chapter we shall learn the following:

• CSRF protection using Flask-SeaSurf

• Atom feeds using werkzeug.contrib

• Syntax highlighting using Pygments

• Caching using Flask-Cache and Redis

• Asynchronous task execution using Celery