> > The idea sounds great, but you'll have some difficulty making it > modular. I'd suggest making a regular Pylons application, as flexible > as possible, and distributing it on PyPI.
Thanks for your input! I have familiarized myself with Pylons enough to see the important points you make, and yeah I have already identified a few areas where I have to be careful to make it easily implementable. The problem is I don't want to build a generic CMS. We had one but soon we realized that trying to make it as generic and flexible as possible was a waste of time. Putting convention before configuration led to lack of flexibility. Putting configuration before convention led to maintenance and deployment nightmares. So what I have actually is a set of reusable MVC components revolving around some minimal central framework. Building a new site basically requires unpacking the component tarball into framework root (each packaged minding the directory structure), and linking URIs to controllers. This leaves with basic functionality upon which individual modifications are made per project. I believe something like this can be rewritten and based on the Pylons framework. As for modularity, being fully RESTful components that's not much of an issue. Each manages a resource behind a set of URIs, and HTTP verbs are basically translated to component CRUD functionality. Which means you can "drag&drop" a component into a project and it works by itself, governing a set of URIs. You GET from an URI, you get the resource (or collection) required. POST to the collection to create new resource. PUT to update. DELETE to remove, etc. Content types and hypermedia drives the presentation layer. HTTP status codes have a meaning. An important part where I can foresee some problems is the security like form authentication because the components do not rely on "sessions", and permission system which requires a specific User component and is database based: dynamic permission profiles. So in short, these are just controllers, (declarative) models and templates that are built to manage a specific resource. They don't publish any API that would require modification of the framework or WSGI middleware itself, except maybe the User component, but I'll see about that, I have to dig deeper into current Pylons implementation with AuthKit, so that I don't reinvent the wheel. What I don't want to do is turn Pylons into Django or build a complex system with lots of integration points, I just want to make a set of functional MVC "templates" and leave to the users to build upon. For example, the current User component has only most important fields: username, email, password, activation status (email based activation). Devs might wish to add other fields. The "SmartPage" component has only title, body and parent_id, because they can be nested in a hierarchy (because of automatic URI path construction). Oh yeah and there's a file manager backend for CKEditor. Anyways, glad to see this might be useful. I'll publish some basic code with examples in the following weeks, primarily after I get a grip on SQLAlchemy (currently the models are based directly on PDO). BTW, the pylonshq.com site has broken Mailing list signup form, and contact Admins is not linked. :) -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en.
