Title: PyMDCMS Date: Wed Jun 15 14:20:32 EEST 2016

As with most software I write, I had a need for something and this is no different.

This time, I wanted to host webpages and the occasional form (although this code is much more powerful than just form receiving) on my "ancient" Alpha system (ev5.6 at 500MHz with a whopping 1GB of RAM)

The primary requirements for this program was minimalism, flexibility and speed.

Apart from python itself, there are only a few dependencies, all of which are platform independent. This was important because anyone who've ever tried to port an application to anything other than middle class caucasian male software / hardware (I'm looking at you, GNU/Linux and i386) will know that problems multiply with dependencies.

PyMDCMS currently requires:

CherryPy>=6.0.1
flup6>=1.1.1
Mako>=1.0.4
Markdown>=2.6.6

There is (as yet) no administration UI, and the page structure is flat (unless you extend it using an applet in which you can do what you please).

To set up, install the above modules (there's a requirements.txt for pip convenience) and hook it up to your webserver like any other FastCGI application.

You will also need to create a configuration file named cms.conf in the program root directory, an example is provided in ./examples/.

Documents served are by default located in ./pages/ and the url to them is simply the filename.

There is a special document index that will be used for when no file was requested. If both a file an app binds to index, then the app will be used.

The markdown is according to the python markdown module with a small twist, you can specify metadata at the beginning of the file to set variables and change the page title and display template from within the page, so if you wish to use a completely different template for just one markdown page, this is possible through setting the template header.

Per-page css and javascript embedding is also possible through the header variables (this is then executed in the theme template file, see theme/default/base for an example)

Variables set in the header can also be used in the contents, like the date at the bottom of this page.

If you'd like to perform an action with a form, you'll need to build an applet. There's a small demo-applet in the apps/test.py file, and it should be enough to get you started.

Applets are required to implement the dispatch method accepting one parameter which is the request. Other than that you're free to do what you like.

There is also a convenience superclass applet.Applet that you may use if you like (but it is not mandatory), which defines mako template rendering methods (for now).

Use Applet.add_template_dir() to add a template directory where you want to store your app-specific templates to the lookup, and then just return self.render("template_file", dict) where dict is a dictionary of template variables.

If an applet sets an object property named metadata to be a dictionary, it will be merged with the page metadata and you are able to override variables just like the markdown pages. You can even override your own "content" variable which actually is where the value retuned from the dispatch method is set.

Last updated: ${date}