Kotti Werkpalast Sprint Wrap Up

Search and kotti_solr

Andi (witsch), Marco and Nuno worked on adding search to Kotti. Kotti now has a search box at the top right of the site that searches the 'title' and 'description' fields of content in the database. A setting called kotti.search_content allows the search function to be overridden. Which is where kotti_solr hooks in to provide search through Solr. kotti_solr has a buildout that installs Solr, and it's already working, but will currently only search the same 'title' and 'description' fields. (That is, it will need to grow adapters so that we can extract all searchable text from content.)

The basic search has already landed in Kotti's master branch in Git and will be available in the next version. There's still a few issues that need to be worked on here before that can happen though:

• Do permission checks with search results; at the moment search will return all items, whether the user has permission to see them or not. (Maybe this is a good time to consider adding something like CMF's allowedUsersAndRoles index to Kotti's Node.)
• Document the kotti.search_content setting.

We could also use some help in styling the search box and search results better. You can test drive the search on the demo site.

Snippets, slots and pyramid_snippets

Christian, Florian, Krille and Ibi worked on adding support for what Wordpress calls Shortcodes and MoinMoin calls macros.

With this, users will be able to insert codes like [gallery] into their pages and have these render to dynamic elements in the public view. Shortcodes may also take arguments like [table-of-contents level=3]. We discussed this idea back in February on the list.

The team decided they would move the core functionality behind what they call snippets into a separate package pyramid_snippets. The idea is that snippets behave like views with the advantage that they can be easily pulled in via AJAX and be used in other places in the site, like in the portlet columns. The integration with Kotti is happening in the snippets branch. Plans are to add a button to TinyMCE that allows users to add snippets instead of having to remember the codes and syntax.

We also want to eventually deprecate Kotti's slots and unify them with snippets so that slot renderers will become views and can be used as snippets and vice versa.

Images

Anreas (disko) added a new Image type and image scaling to Kotti core. He extracted these out of the nice kotti_imagegallery add-on that he had written earlier.

Predefined image scales include span1 (60x120) to span12 (1160x2320). Additional image scales can be configured through the kotti.image_scales variables.

Rich text editing

Andreas (disko) and Daniel worked on improving the rich text editing story for Kotti. Based on the work done on images and scaling by Andreas, they created kotti_tinymce, which is an add-on that provides image and file upload, browsing and insertion through TinyMCE.

kotti_tinymce is actually based on the Products.TinyMCE add-on for Plone, and uses the exact same JavaScript resources. Only page templates and CSS are overridden and the server-side AJAX hooks implemented to work with Kotti. (We were quite amazed at how well this worked out.)

One problem with kotti_tinymce is that there's no functional tests. We've just verified that things are working by clicking through all the dialogues manually. Considering that Products.TinyMCE is evolving separately and that we want to maintain upstream compatibility, we really want to implement some browser-based functional tests to be able to guarantee a reasonable level of stability. These tests will also help us fix the remaining bugs in kotti_tinymce.

You can try out the rich text editing improvements on the demo site!

HTTP Caching

Andreas (disko) and Daniel added HTTP caching into the Kotti core. There's now a default caching policy which may be overridden using the kotti.caching_policy_chooser setting. The default policy is to not cache HTML, cache media for four hours, cache static resources for a month and so on.

The http caching code is based on code previously written by Daniel.

Paster templates

Marco and Tom worked on kotti_paster which Marco initially started. They've been working on a set of accumulative templates for Kotti that are based around Buildout and try to define best practices for different aspects of Kotti and Pyramid development for beginners.