kotti_tinymce: new version

Vanč <ferewuz> worked on upgrading Kotti's WISYWIG editor TinyMCE to version 4.0.2. This new version features a much nicer looking user interface, which fits a lot better into the overall Kotti style. It also works better with smaller displays, as the editor will now scale down along with the browser window's width. Our existing image-upload and document-linking pop-ups were updated to work with the new version. You can test drive on our demo site.

deform_bootstrap: tabbed forms

Natan <nightmarebadger> worked on adding tabbed forms support to deform_bootstrap. With this change, each nested (Mapping)Schema in your Colander schema will be rendered inside its own tab. As an example, consider this Client schema:

import colander

class Person(colander.Schema):
    name = colander.SchemaNode(
        colander.String(),
        title='Name',
        )

class Car(colander.Schema):
    horsepower = colander.SchemaNode(
        colander.Integer(),
        title='Horsepower',
        )

class Client(colander.Schema):
    person = Person(title='Person data')
    car = Car(title='Car stuffs')

A deform_bootstrap form using the Client schema will render with two tabs 'Person data' and 'Car stuffs'.

kotti_multilingual: translated content

kotti_multilingual was started by Andreas <disko> earlier this year. It includes basic support for language roots and switching between languages. The sprinters decided to use this package as the starting point for adding more advanced content translation support.

Before getting down to coding, we first had a round of discussion with Domen <iElectric>, Ramon <bloodbare>, Jure <ibi> and me. In particular, we discussed how plone.multilingual handles translations and 'language independent fields' and compared it to the venerable LinguaPlone. We decided that we'd use the LinguaPlone model, where translations derive from a so-called canonical document. This is the only document that holds the actual data for any of the language independent fields, and where all translated documents refer to when they look up those fields.

This is still a work in progress, but so far we've managed to h̶a̶c̶k̶ convince SQLAlchemy to return the value of a language independent attribute from the canonical document, if it exists.

We've also implemented linking between translations using a separate translations table. This, too, works quite similar to how LinguaPlone does it when you configure it to use one root folder per language (e.g. /en, /de, and so on). For locating the destination folder for new translations, we look up the parent document's translation, and put the new translation in there. Thus, a translation from /en/food/mexican will automagically be created at /de/food/mexican, given that /de/food is already a translation of /en/food.

Versioning support

Andreas pointed us to the SQLAlchmey Versioned Objects example. He had used it in a Pyramid project and it worked very well for him. So Vanč took this up on the last day of the sprint and implemented a prototype for history support for Kotti.

Vanč reports that his prototype saves the old version of a document anytime you edit it, and keeps all the old versions. Next on his list is adding a user interface for viewing older versions (there's merely a list right now), and adding options for deciding which content types to version and how many old versions to keep. Other things to work on are a separate button for when you want to save a new version, so that small changes can be made without creating a new version. And possibly a comment field to describe what the changes in your new version are about.

Finishing the tutorial

Natan took on the important task of finishing the developer tutorial. Previously, the tutorial introduced concepts such as setting up a new project, configuring Kotti, adding Poll and Choice content types, and simple views. But it did not have forms to actually vote on the poll. This is now being added.

During the sprint, we also discussed which are the most important topics that the docs don't cover well enough yet. We decided we should add more documentation for users and security, workflows, and a more advanced forms example.

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.

Where to go from here

• Read Kotti's documentation on readthedocs.org
• Try Kotti on the demo server
• Find Kotti releases on PyPI
• Find Kotti's source on GitHub
• Look at the source of two Kotti add-ons:
  • kotti_twitter adds a Twitter box
  • kotti_calendar adds a calendar content type and events

Lessons learned

• Don't teach Pyramid, you'll become useless soon
• Instead recommend hard-to-learn frameworks, or better yet, vendor-tied and hard-to-install black boxes
• Find a new job quick before more people find out about Pyramid

Seriously, what more important metric do we have for choosing one framework over another if not that: How long does it take your team to learn it and be productive with it?

Who did it

These guys rocked apps.uc.pt: Mario José Bernardes, Valentim Branquinho, João Santos, Hugo Branquinho, Pedro Pinheiro, Pedro Almeida and myself.