History

The Pocoo project started in 2004 with the goal to create a bulletin board written in Python by Armin Ronacher and Georg Brandl. On the quest to a working Python web application we quickly recognized that a few more tools would be helpful to create web applications in Python.

After a few iterations and failed projects we ended up with our current toolset of the Jinja 2 templating engine and the Werkzeug WSGI toolkit. Along the way we also started working on a syntax highlighting package called Pygments and made an excursion into the field of documentation software with Sphinx, which quickly became the most popular documentation solution in the Python community.

The original plan to develop a bulletin board is long dead now and the original name of the software was reused for the team that is working on all these packages. However, recently the Solace project was incorporated which has some forum software elements.

The name “Pocoo” bears no meaning and multiple tries to find a suitable Backronym failed. It originally was chosen because it sounded “cute” and is now also the name of our logo owl. Pocoo is pronounced /ˈpokʉː/