Matt,
> I'm working on a GeoNode customization as well. Some of the features I > need to add are customizable header banners for user-created maps, querying > and highlighting selected features on the map, user defined layer > categories, and displaying the layer tree organized by category. ( > http://github.com/mbertrand/cga-worldmap). > This is really exciting to hear about. It's hard to tell from these brief descriptions, but I'm curious: are all of these additions totally custom for your needs, or could any of them be implemented in a general way and contributed back to the core? Some of these features sound like things we are working on or plan to in the future, and it would be great to collaborate. Please don't be shy about bringing up your needs and progress on this list, or joining the public developer list at [email protected] if you want to discuss particular patches. On Oct 28, 2010, at 8:51 PM, Christian Spanring wrote: > > Thanks! There are a couple of good hints how to approach our issue - > duplicating the template dir structure and changing the template dir setting > seems like a good way to start. I also like the idea of havin g a fallback > to the default geonode. > > A colleague pointed me to the class based views discussion in Django > Development http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/class-based-views/ > > From what I read there, this seems to solve exactly what I'm trying to do. > > Christian > > On Oct 28, 2010, at 8:09 PM, David Winslow wrote: > > Well, we haven't done a lot of heavily customized applications, but in the > future I think it would be great t o have a good plan for people who want to > dig into Django a bit and use GeoNode as a platform for their own tools. So > I'm glad to hear you're looking into it. > > In previous experiments with having an alternative theme building off the > core GeoNode, we had a setup where the alternate site had its own se > ttings.py, where early in the Python file, there was a line like: > > from geonode.settings import * > > > Then we modified various values as needed (INSTALLED_APPS = INSTALLED_APPS > + ('myapp',)). I think this approach worked ok, but it was a little > cumbersome to keep the customized site up to date with the main site as new > pages and apps were added. I'm not sure what a better solution might be... > we have started to recognize a "local_settings.py" file next to the GeoNode > settin gs to accommodate site-specific changes in a file that won't be > overwritten on updates, but I don't think that approach works well if you > want to add extra Django apps to the site. > > A similar approach *should* work pretty well for the urls.py though. You > can just import geonode.urls in your urls.py and write "urlpatterns = > urlpatterns + geonode.urls.urlpatterns" to have the GeoNode URLs used as a > fallback if none of your URL patterns match a request. > > Django also has a nice system for overriding templates. If you override > TEMPLATE_DIRS to add an extra directory containing your customized templates > before the directories it already uses, then those templates will override. > So you would have templates in places like like > [/opt/mysite/geonode/login.html] and your settings would have an entry like: > > TEMPLATE_DIRS = "/opt/mysite/", \ > > path_extrapolate('geonode/templates'), \ > > path_extrapolate('geonode/maps/templates'), \ > > path_extrapolate('django/contrib/admin/templates', >> 'django'), > > > Don't worry about the path_extrapolate function there, it duplicates some > path-munging functionality already present in the Django template system and > will probably be going away in a release soon after 1.0. 1.1, along with > other Pinax integration and general adoption of Django idioms, should also > be using the > django-staticfiles<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/static-files/> > app > to provide simila r functionality for CSS and JavaScript resources, should > you need to override or add on to what's used in GeoNode. > > I hope this provides you some good places to start investigating. > > -- > David Winslow > OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org/ > > On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Spanring, Christian > <[email protected]>wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> I've started customizing a GeoNode instance and was wondering if other >> users here are trying to do something similar. Mainly to check/discuss if >> the path I'm going makes sense. >> >> The g oal is to maintain maximum forward compatibility with the main >> GeoNode repository (painless future updates/merges). At the same time, we >> obviously want a custom design for and add other functionality (Django apps) >> to our GeoNode instance. >> >> >> So far I've thought about a few approaches: >> >> A) override urls.py with my app's urls.py >> http://github.com/cspanring/geonode/blob/develop/src/GeoNodePy/geonode/urls.py#L16and >> duplicating code from the default GeoNode apps seems like a really bad >> idea. >> >> B) modifying the default templates >> http://github.com/cspanring/geonode/blob/develop/src/GeoNodePy/geonode/templates/page_layout.html#L12would >> break forward compatibility at some point. That solution worked as >> quick hack to have a basic custom design online but I would rather not touch >> the default templates in the long run. >> >> C) specifying templates generally in urls.py >> http://github.com/cspanring/geonode/blob/develop/src/GeoNodePy/geonode/urls.py#L20instead >> of hard-coding them into views would allow users to customize >> frontend designs, like switching templates, pretty easily. That's my >> favorite approach so far but doing that by myself, changing all views to >> that schema, would probably break forward compatibility (seamless merging >> with future GeoNode updates/fixes) of our instance too. >> >> Any other thoughts? >> >> Thanks, >> Christian >> >> Please be advised that the Massachusetts Secretary of State considers >> e-mail to be a public record, and therefore subject to the Massachusetts >> Public Records Law, M.G.L. c. 66 ? 10. >> > > < /div> > > > -- Sebastian Benthall OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
