Kotti 0.1a2

A friendly, light-weight web content management system (WCMS). Written in Python, based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy.

What is Kotti?

Kotti is a user-friendly web content management system (WCMS).

Features:

• Support for pluggable authentication modules and single sign-on

• Access control lists (ACL) for fine-grained security

• Separation between public area and editor interface

• Separation of basic and advanced functionality in the editor user interface, enabling a pleasant learning curve for editors

• Easily extensible with your own look & feel with no programming required

• Easily extensible with your own content types and views

Note

At this point, Kotti is experimental. You’re encouraged to try it out and give us feedback, but don’t use it in production yet. We’re likely to make fundamental changes to both Kotti’s API and its database structure in weeks to come.

Installation

It’s recommended to install Kotti inside a virtualenv.

Change into the directory of your Kotti download and issue:

$ python setup.py install

To run Kotti with the included development profile then type:

$ paster serve development.ini

To run all tests:

$ python setup.py nosetests

Configuring Kotti

Kotti includes two Paste Deploy configuration files in production.ini and development.ini.

kotti.authentication_policy_factory and kotti.authorization_policy_factory

The development.ini configuration disables security by setting two configuration variables in the [app:Kotti] part:

kotti.authentication_policy_factory = kotti.none_factory
kotti.authorization_policy_factory = kotti.none_factory

The production.ini does not set these configuration variables, which results in the default authentication and authorization policy factories to be used, which use pyramid.authentication.AuthTktAuthenticationPolicy and pyramid.authorization.ACLAuthorizationPolicy respectively.

kotti.session_factory

The kotti.session_factory configuration variable allows the overriding of the default session factory, which is pyramid.session.UnencryptedCookieSessionFactoryConfig.

kotti.templates.master_view and kotti.templates.master_edit

The default configuration for these two variables is:

kotti.templates.master_view = kotti:templates/view/master.pt
kotti.templates.master_edit = kotti:templates/edit/master.pt

You may override these to provide your own master templates. To do this, you must provide what Pyramid calls an asset specification. An example:

kotti.templates.master_view = kotti:templates/mytemplates/master_view.pt

kotti.templates.base_css, kotti.templates.view_css, and kotti.templates.edit_css

These variables define the CSS files used by the default master templates. The defaults are:

kotti.templates.base_css = kotti:static/base.css
kotti.templates.view_css = kotti:static/view.css
kotti.templates.edit_css = kotti:static/edit.css

Again, these can be overridden with paths relative to the kotti package:

kotti.templates.view_css = kotti:static/myview.css

kotti.includes

The default configuration here is:

kotti.includes = kotti.views.view kotti.views.edit

These point to modules that contain an includeme function. An includeme function that registers an edit view for an Event resource might look like this:

def includeme(config):
    config.add_view(
        edit_event,
        context=Event,
        name='edit',
        permission='edit',
        )

Examples of views and their registrations are in Kotti itself. Take a look at kotti.views.view and kotti.views.edit. XXX Need example extension package.

kotti.available_types

The default configuration here is:

kotti.available_types = kotti.resources.Document

You may replace or add your own types with this variable. An example:

kotti.available_types =
    kotti.resources.Document
    mypackage.resources.Calendar
    mypackage.resources.Event

kotti.resources.Document is itself a class that’s suitable as an example of a Kotti content type implementation:

class Document(Node):
    type_info = Node.type_info.copy(
        name=u'Document',
        add_view=u'add_document',
        addable_to=[u'Document'],
        )

    def __init__(self, body=u"", mime_type='text/html', **kwargs):
        super(Document, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.body = body
        self.mime_type = mime_type

documents = Table('documents', metadata,
    Column('id', Integer, ForeignKey('nodes.id'), primary_key=True),
    Column('body', UnicodeText()),
    Column('mime_type', String(30)),
)
mapper(Document, documents, inherits=Node, polymorphic_identity='document')

ACL security

ACL security is currently a work in progress

Kotti is currently lacking a user interface to conrol ACLs of individual items. The default root object is created with an ACL that looks like this:

('Allow', 'group:managers', ALL_PERMISSIONS)
('Allow', 'system.Authenticated', ('view',))
('Allow', 'group:editors', ('add', 'edit'))

This ACL is then inherited throughout the site.

Issue tracker and development

Kotti is developed on Github. The issue tracker also lives there.

Under the hood

Kotti is written in Python and based on the two excellent libraries Pyramid and SQLAlchemy. Kotti tries to leverage these libraries as much as possible, thus:

• minimizing the amount of code written,

• and allowing users familiar with these libraries to feel right at home.

Kotti aims to use few abstractions, yet it aims to be somewhat extensible.

You can extend Kotti with new content types and views from your own Python packages. If all that you want is replace templates and stylesheets, then it’s sufficient to hook up plain old files in the configuration.

For storage, Kotti uses any relational database for which there is support in SQLAlchemy. There’s no storage abstraction apart from that.

Read this blog post for more implementation details.

Thanks

Kotti is proud to be sponsored by the University of Coimbra.