Kotti 1.0.0-alpha

A high-level, Pythonic web application framework based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy. It includes an extensible Content Management System called the Kotti CMS.

Kotti is a high-level, Pythonic web application framework based on Pyramid and SQLAlchemy. It includes an extensible Content Management System called the Kotti CMS (see below).

Kotti is most useful when you are developing applications that

• have complex security requirements,

• use workflows, and/or

• work with hierarchical data.

Built on top of a number of best-of-breed software components, most notably Pyramid and SQLAlchemy, Kotti introduces only a few concepts of its own, thus hopefully keeping the learning curve flat for the developer.

Kotti CMS

You can try out the Kotti CMS on Kotti’s demo page.

Kotti CMS is a content management system that’s heavily inspired by Plone. Its main features are:

• User-friendliness: editors can edit content where it appears; thus the edit interface is contextual and intuitive

• WYSIWYG editor: includes a rich text editor

• Responsive design: Kotti builds on Twitter Bootstrap, which looks good both on desktop and mobile

• Templating: you can extend the CMS with your own look & feel with almost no programming required

• Add-ons: install a variety of add-ons and customize them as well as many aspects of the built-in CMS by use of an INI configuration file

• Security: the advanced user and permissions management is intuitive and scales to fit the requirements of large organizations

• Internationalized: the user interface is fully translatable, Unicode is used everywhere to store data

Support and Documentation

Click here to access Kotti’s full documentation

License

Kotti is offered under the BSD-derived Repoze Public License.

Authors

Kotti was created by Daniel Nouri.

Major contributing authors include:

• Andreas Kaiser

• Andreas Zeidler

• Christian Neumann

• Daniel Nouri

• Jure Cerjak

• Marco Scheidhuber

• Nuno Teixeira

• Tom Lazar

For a complete list of contributors, see https://github.com/Kotti/Kotti/graphs/contributors

Change History

1.0.0-alpha - 2014-12-20

• Add a new scaffold based on Pyramid’s pcreate. To run the tests for the scaffold, you must invoke py.test with the --runslow option. This is enabled by default on Travis.

• kotti._resolve_dotted now return a resolved copy of the settings (instead of in place resolving as before).

• Factor out DBMS specific patches and make them available to the test fixtures.

• Add new fixtures that can also be used in add on tests:

  • custom_settings does nothing and is meant to be overridden in add on test suites. It allows injection of arbitrary key / values into the settings dict used in tests.

  • unresolved_settings is guaranteed to only contain unresolved string values (or lists therof).

  • settings is now guaranteed to be fully resolved.

  • webtest returns a webtest.TestApp instance with support for the @user marker. This should be used instead of browser doctests for functional tests.

• Use RTD theme for documentation.

• Use latest versions of all requirements. The only upgrade with notable differences is lingua (from 1.4 to 3.6.1). This completely changes lingua’s API. See docs/developing/basic/translations.rst for details on the greatly simplified new usage.

• Remove code (incl. tests) that has been marked as deprecated since (at least) Kotti 0.8.

• Revise UI to make better use of Bootstrap 3.

• Allow parameters for move-child-position views to either be in request.POST or request.json_body.

• Don’t use Pyramid code that is marked as deprecated:

  • replace pyramid.security.authenticated_userid with request.authenticated_userid.

• Deprecate kotti.security.has_permission to be consistent with the corresponding deprecation in Pyramid 1.5. You should now use request.has_permission instead.

• Make all values in Node.path end in /. This makes it consistent over all nodes (including root) and correspond to the values of request.resource_url. As a side effect querying becomes easier. However, this might need adjustments in your code if you were expecting the old path values before. A migration step for DB upgrades is included.

0.10b1 - 2014-07-11

• Add a __json__ method to MutationList and MutationDict.

  This is to allow Pyramid’s serializer to just work.

0.10a4 - 2014-06-19

• Upgrade Pyramid to version 1.5.1.

0.10a3 - 2014-06-11

• Upgrade SQLAlchemy and alembic dependencies from 0.8.2 and 0.5.0 to 0.9.4 and 0.6.5 respectively.

• Do not flush within Node.path event handlers. We would otherwise trigger object handlers with funny object states.

• Fix bug with Node.path where we attach a Node instance to a parent that has been loaded from the database, but its parents have not been loaded yet.

• Fix deprecation warnings with regard to Pyramid’s custom_view_predicates and set_request_property. Also deprecate kotti.views.util.is_root.

0.10a2 - 2014-06-05

• Add Node.path column. This allows queries based on path, so it’s much easier just to find all children, grandchildren etc. of a given node:

  DBSession.query(Node).filter(Node.path.startswith(mynode.path))

• Adds session attribute to the request attributes to copy to the slot view request.

Migrations

• Upgrading from 0.9.2 to 0.10 requires you to run a migration script on your database. To run the migration, call:

  $ bin/kotti-migrate <myconfig.ini> upgrade

  Make sure you backup your database before running the migration!

0.10a1 - 2014-05-19

• Kotti is now based on Bootstrap 3 (and therefore Deform 2).

  THIS IS A BACKWARD INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE W.R.T. MOST TEMPLATES, INCLUDING FORM TEMPLATES! IF YOUR PROJECT EITHER HAS TEMPLATE CUSTOMIZATIONS OR DEPENDS ON ADD-ONS THINGS WILL LOOK BROKEN!

  If you only use Kotti’s default UI, chances are good that your application will continue to work well unchanged. Kotti’s API is mostly unchanged and fully backward compatible though.

• Rework implementation of ‘kotti.util.Link’ (‘ViewLink’) to be more flexible.

  There’s now proper support for nesting ‘edit_links’, so that the special ‘action_links’ list is no longer necessary. Links now also make better use of templates for rendering, and are probably easier to customize overall.

• Added compatiblity for and now require Pyramid>=1.5. #273

• In tests, turned settings and setup_app into fixtures to ease overriding.

• Add kotti_context_url JS global variable. For more details on why this is needed see:

  • https://github.com/Kotti/kotti_tinymce/issues/19

  • https://github.com/Kotti/Kotti/issues/219

  • https://github.com/Kotti/kotti_newsitem/issues/2

  • https://github.com/Kotti/kotti_calendar/issues/4

• Adds delete permission needed for ‘delete’ and ‘delete_nodes’ views. The default workflow was updated in consequence. It allows to elaborate more fine grained workflows : for instance, create a role which can edit a content but not delete it.

  To make existent Kotti’s instances using default workflow compatibles and avoid users that have ‘editor’ role (and so far, whom have the possibility to edit and delete the content) to not be able to delete contents, it’s needed to reset workflow with “kotti-reset-workflow <application ini file>” command.

• Fix #308: Unique name constraint issue during paste of a cut node.

0.9.2 - 2013-10-15

• Fix #268: Convert None to colander.null in get_appstruct so that serialization doesn’t fail (needed due to recent changes in colander).

0.9.1 - 2013-09-25

• Allow user admins to modify user passwords.

• Require newer kotti_tinymce (source code editing was broken in 0.4).

0.9 - 2013-09-17

• Add multi file content upload. You can now select several files from your local storage that you want to upload and chose what content nodes shall be created in your Kotti site. Currently files with MIME types of image/* can be uploaded and be created as either Image or File nodes, all other MIME types will be created as File. In future releases (or add-on products) this can be extended with additional converters allowing for example to upload HTML files and create Document nodes with the content of the title tag becoming the node’s title, the content of the body tag becoming the node’s body and so on.

• Fix #253: Many translations weren’t included in the last release.

  ‘–use-fuzzy’ translations when running ‘compile_catalog’ adds back translations that were recently marked as fuzzy. (All translations that were marked as fuzzy in German were still accurate.)

• Fix #252: Wrap templates where extract_messages failed with <tal:block>

• Fix #249: TinyMCE translations work again.

0.9b2 - 2013-08-20

• Fix #251: Broken comparison of NestedMutationDict and NestedMutationList.

• Update kotti_tinymce to version 4.0.2.

• Fix bug in kotti.views.content.FileEditForm to preserve file content while editing it.

0.9b1 - 2013-06-26

• Add kotti.util.ViewLink.visible method for better control over whether a view link should be visible or not. This allows us to move formerly hardcoded action links defined in kotti.views.edit.actions into TypeInfo.action_links and thus make them configurable either globally or per content type.

• kotti.security.view_permitted will now check for pyramid.security.view_execution_permitted with a request method set to ‘GET’ by default. It used to check for a view that matches the current request’s method.

  This fixes an issue where kotti.util.ViewLink.permitted would by mistake check for a ‘POST’ view when the current request was ‘POST’.

• Add INavigationRoot interface and TemplateAPI.navigation_root property. The latter returns the first content node in the lineage that implements INavigationRoot or the root node if INavigationRoot is not implemented by any node in the lineage. Make the nav.pt template use api.navigation_root instead of api.root. This allows third party add-ons to define content types that can reside somewhere in the content tree while still being the root for the navigation.

• Move navigation related view code to new module kotti.views.navigation. Deprecate imports from the old locations.

• Remove some code that has been deprecated in 0.6 or 0.7.

• A view assigned to a slot can access the slot name where its rendered.

• Add missing transaction.commit() in kotti-reset-workflow.

• Fix bug in kotti.views.util.render_view where local roles weren’t respected correctly.

• Add helper method kotti.message.send_email for sending general emails. These emails must follow a particular structure. Look at kotti:templates/email-set-password.pt as an example.

0.9a2 - 2013-05-04

• Fix #222: Use SQLAlchemy’s before_flush event for object events.

  We were using the wrong events previously. The problem with before_insert, before_update, and before_delete was that event handlers could not reliably call Session.add, Session.delete, and change mapped relationships. But only SQLAlchemy 0.8 started emitting a warning when that was done.

  Also deprecated ObjectAfterDelete because I don’t think it’s useful.

• Remove the html5shim from the master templates and use the fanstatic package js.html5shiv instead.

• A temporary fix for #187. Basically suppresses DetachedInstanceError.

• Add kotti.events.subscribe decorator. See the also updated docs on that topic / module for details.

0.9a1 - 2013-03-12

• Fix ordering on how include_me functions are loaded. This puts Kotti’s own and Kotti add-on search paths in front of deform_bootstrap’s.

• Add image thumbs with preview popovers to @@contents view.

• Add drag’n’drop ordering support to @@contents view.

• Add “toggle all” checkbox to @@contents view.

• Add contents path bar to @@contents view.

0.8 - 2013-03-12

• No changes.

0.8b2 - 2013-02-08

• Fix Kotti’s tests to no longer trigger deprecation warnings. Kotti’s funcargs need to be better documented still, see #141.

• Add a fanstatic.Group ‘tagit’ and need() it in the defered widget. This is needed to make the tags widget render correctly with a theme package enabled until the defered widget is replaced by a widget class that declares its requirements in the usual deform style.

• Transform setup_users, setup_user and prefs views into class-based views. Add a little text at subsection Security on developer manual mentioning those views.

0.8b1 - 2012-12-30

• No changes

0.8a2 - 2012-12-15

• Remove test related dependencies on requirements.txt. So now we need to run python setup.py dev to get testing dependencies.

• Update packages versions on requirements.txt for latest working versions.

• Added a tags display in views for documents, files, folders, and images, where they show up as a horizontal list between description and body.

• Modified general search to include simple tags searching. The default search in Kotti works on a simple search term matching basis. Tags searching is added here in a simple fashion also, such that you can only search for one tag at a time, but partial matches work: searching for ‘foo’ finds content tagged ‘foo bar’. You can also search on single tags by clicking an individual tag in the tags display of an item. More sophisticated tags searching, just as for general search, is left to dedicated add-ons.

0.8a1 - 2012-11-13

• Make language-dependent URL normalization the default. (How to do this used to be a cookbook entry.)

• Cleanup node edit actions and use decorated view classes.

• Add contents view with actions for multiple items.

• Add children_with_permission method to ContainerMixin.

• Add UI for default_view selection.

• Deprecate ‘kotti.views.edit.generic_add’ and ‘generic_edit’. Just use class-based forms instead.

0.7.2 - 2012-10-02

• Improve installation instructions. Now uses tagged requirements.txt file.

• Added event request POST vars to the request for the slot viewlet.

• Added IFile and IImage interfaces to allow for file and image subclasses to reuse the same view (registrations).

0.7.1 - 2012-08-30

• Add deletion of users to the users management.

• Fix tag support for files and images.

• Upgrade to Twitter Bootstrap 2.1

  • remove lots of CSS that is no longer needed

  • fix responsive layout that was broken on some phone size screen resolutions

• Add “Site Setup” submenu / remove @@setup view.

0.7 - 2012-08-16

• Fix critical issue with migrations where version number would not be persisted in the Alembic versions table.

0.7rc1 - 2012-08-14

• No changes.

0.7a6 - 2012-08-07

• Fix a bug with connections in the migration script. This would previously cause Postgres to deadlock when calling kotti-migrate.

0.7a5 - 2012-08-07

• Add workflow support based on repoze.workflow. A simple workflow is included in workflow.zcml and is active by default. Use kotti.use_workflow = 0 to deactivate. The workflow support adds a drop-down that allows users with state_change permission to modify the workflow state.

• Change the default layout

  Kotti’s new default look is now even closer to the Bootstrap documentation, with the main nav bar at the very top and the edit bar right below.

  Upgrade note: if you have a customized main_template and want to use the recent changes in that template, you need to swap positions of nav.pt and editor-bar.pt api.render_template calls and remove the search.pt call from the main_template (it’s now called from within nav.pt). Everything else is completely optional.

• Add migrations via Alembic. A new script kotti-migrate helps with managing database upgrades of Kotti and Kotti add-ons. Run kotti-migrate <your.ini> upgrade to upgrade the Kotti database to the latest version.

  Add-on authors should see the kotti.migrate module’s docstring for more details.

• Make Document.body searchable (and therefore the search feature actually useful for the first time).

• Add a “minify” command to compress CSS and JS resources.

  To use it run:

  python setup.py dev
  python setup.py minify

  The minify command assumes, that all resources are in kotti/static/. YUI compressor is used for compression and will be automatically installed when running python setup.py dev. However, you still need a JVM on your development machine to be able to use the minify command.

• Fix settings: only values for kotti* keys should be converted to unicode strings.

• Fix #89: Validate email address for uniqueness when user changes it.

• Fix #91: Styling of search box.

• Fix #104: Make fanstatic resources completely overridable.

• Enabled deferred loading on File.data column.

Migrations

• Upgrading from 0.6 to 0.7 requires you to run a migration script on your database. To run the migration, call:

  $ bin/kotti-migrate <myconfig.ini> upgrade

  Make sure you backup your database before running the migration!

• Upgrading to 0.7 will initialize workfow state and permissions for all your content objects, unless you’ve overwritten kotti-use_workflow to not use a workflow (use 0) or a custom one.

  It is important that sites that have custom permissions, e.g. custom modifications to SITE_ACL, turn off workflow support prior to running the upgrade script.

0.7a4 - 2012-06-25

• Add minified versions JS/CSS files.

• Fix #88: logging in with email.

• Update translations.

0.7a3 - 2012-06-15

• Include kotti.tinymce which adds plug-ins for image and file upload and content linking to the TinyMCE rich text editor.

• Slot renderers have been replaced by normal views (or viewlets). kotti.views.slots.register has been deprecated in favour of kotti.views.slots.assign_slot, which works similarly, but takes a view name of a registered view instead of a function for registration.

• Switch to fanstatic for static resource management.

  Upgrade note: This requires changes to existing *.ini application configuration files. Concretely, you’ll need to add a filter:fanstatic section and a pipeline:main section and rename an existing app:main section to app:Kotti or the like. Take a look at Kotti’s own development.ini for an example.

• Retire the undocumented kotti.resources.Setting class and table. kotti.get_settings will now return registry.settings straight, without looking for persistent overrides in the database.

• Drop support for Pyramid<1.3, since we use pyramid.response.FileResponse, and kotti_tinymce uses pyramid.view.view_defaults.

• Fix encoding error with non-ascii passwords.

0.7a2 - 2012-06-07

• Do not allow inactive users to reset their password.

0.7a1 - 2012-06-01

Features

• Add a new ‘Image’ content type and image scaling, originally from the kotti_image_gallery add-on. See kotti.image_scales.* settings.

• Add search and related setting kotti.search_content.

• Add subscriber to set cache headers based on caching rules. See also related setting kotti.caching_policy_chooser.

• Remove TinyMCE from the core.

• Move email templates into page templates in kotti:templates/email-set-password.pt and kotti:templates/email-reset-password.pt. This is to make them easier to translate and customize. This deprecates kotti.message.send_set_password.

• Add a ‘edit_inhead’ slot for stuff that goes into the edit interface’s head. ‘inhead’ is no longer be used in ‘edit/master.pt’.

• For more details, see also http://danielnouri.org/notes/2012/05/28/kotti-werkpalast-sprint-wrap-up/

Bugs

• Fix bug with group edit views. See https://github.com/Pylons/Kotti/pull/61

• Fix bug where user.last_login_date was not set during automic login after the set password screen.

0.6.3 - 2012-05-08

• Add tag support. All content objects now have tags. They can be added in the UI using the “jQuery UI Tag-it!” widget. See https://github.com/Pylons/Kotti/pull/55 .

• Fix a bug with file download performance.

0.6.2 - 2012-04-21

• Links in Navigation view lead to node view. Added edit links to view the node’s edit form.

• Hitting ‘Cancel’ now returns to the context node for add/edit views

0.6.1 - 2012-03-30

• Added button to show/hide nodes from navigation in the order screen.

• The ‘rename’ action now strips slashes out of names. Fixes #53.

• Add Dutch translation.

• Allow translation of TinyMCE’s UI (starting with deform 0.9.5)

• Separated out testing dependencies. Run bin/python setup.py dev to install Kotti with extra dependencies for testing.

• Deprecate ‘kotti.includes’ setting. Use the standard ‘pyramid.includes’ instead.

• Setting ‘Node.__acl__’ to the empty list will now persist the empty list instead of setting ‘None’.

• Let ‘pyramid_deform’ take care of configuring deform with translation dirs and search paths.

0.6.0 - 2012-03-22

• Add Japanese translation.

• Enforce lowercase user names and email with registration and login.

• Moved SQLAlchemy related stuff from kotti.util into kotti.sqla.

• You can also append to ‘Node.__acl__’ now in addition to setting the attribute.

0.6.0b3 - 2012-03-17

• Have the automatic __tablename__ and polymorphic_identity for CamelCase class names use underscores, so a class ‘MyFancyDocument’ gets a table name of ‘my_fancy_documents’ and a type of ‘my_fancy_document’.

0.6.0b2 - 2012-03-16

• Make the ‘item_type’ attribute of AddForm optional. Fixes #41.

• kotti.util.title_to_name will now return a name with a maximum length of 40. Fixes #31.

0.6.0b1 - 2012-03-15

• Use declarative style instead of class mapper for SQLAlchemy resources.

  Unfortunately, this change is backwards incompatible with existing content types (not with existing databases however). Updating your types to use Declarative is simple. See kotti_calendar for an example: https://github.com/dnouri/kotti_calendar/commit/509d46bd596ff338e0a88f481339882de72e49e0#diff-1

0.5.2 - 2012-03-10

• A new ‘Actions’ menu makes copy, paste, delete and rename of items more accessible.

• Add German translation.

• Populators no longer need to call transaction.commit() themselves.

0.5.1 - 2012-02-27

• Internationalize user interface. Add Portuguese as the first translation.

• A new ‘Add’ menu in the editor toolbar allows for a more intuitive adding of items in the CMS.

• Refine Node.copy. No longer copy over local roles per default.

0.5.0 - 2012-02-15

• Move Kotti’s default user interface to use Twitter Bootstrap 2.

• Add a new ‘File’ content type.

• Add CSRF protection to some forms.

• Remove Kotti’s FormController in favor of using pyramid_deform.

• Use plone.i18n to normalize titles to URL parts.

• Add a separate navigation screen that replaces the former intelligent breadcrumbs menu.

• Use pyramid_beaker as the default session factory.

• Make kotti.messages.send_set_password a bit more flexible.

0.4.5 - 2012-01-19

• Add ‘kotti.security.has_permission’ which may be used instead of ‘pyramid.security.has_permission’.

  The difference is that Kotti’s version will set the “authorization context” to be the context that you pass to ‘has_permission’. The effect is that ‘list_groups’ will return a more correct list of local roles, i.e. the groups in the given context instead of ‘request.context’.

• Add a template (‘forbidden.pt’) for when user is logged in but still getting HTTPForbidden.

0.4.4 - 2012-01-05

• The “Forbidden View” will no longer redirect clients that don’t accept ‘text/html’ to the login form.

• Fix bug with ‘kotti.site_title’ setting.

0.4.3 - 2011-12-22

• Add ‘kotti.root_factory’ setting which allows the override Kotti’s default Pyramid root factory. Also, make master templates more robust so that a minimal root with ‘__parent__’ and ‘__name__’ can be rendered.

• The ‘kotti.tests’ was factored out. Tests should now import from ‘kotti.testing’.

0.4.2 - 2011-12-20

• More convenient overrides for add-on packages by better use of ‘config.commit()’.

0.4.1 - 2011-12-20

• Modularize Kotti’s Paste App Factory ‘kotti.main’.

• Allow explicit setting of tables that Kotti creates (‘kotti.use_tables’).

0.4.0 - 2011-12-14

• Remove configuration variables ‘kotti.templates.*’ in favour of ‘kotti.asset_overrides’, which uses Pyramid asset specs and their overrides.

• Remove ‘TemplateAPI.__getitem__’ and instead add ‘TemplateAPI.macro’ which has a similar but less ‘special’ API.

• Factor snippets in ‘kotti/templates/snippets.pt’ out into their own templates. Use ‘api.render_template’ to render them instead of macros.

0.3.1 - 2011-12-09

• Add ‘keys’ method to mutation dicts (see 0.3.0).

0.3.0 - 2011-11-30

• Replace Node.__annotations__ in favor of an extended Node.annotations.

  Node.annotations will attempt to not only recognize changes to subobjects of type dict, it will also handle list objects transparently. That is, changing arbitrary JSON structures should just work with regard to calling node.annotations.changed() when the structure was changed.

0.2.10 - 2011-11-22

• ‘api.format_datetime’ now also accepts a timestamp in addition to datetime.

0.2.9 - 2011-11-21

• Remove MANIFEST.in in favour of using ‘setuptools-git’.

0.2.8 - 2011-11-21

• Remove ‘PasteScript’ dependency since that would result in spurious errors when installing Kotti. See http://jenkins.danielnouri.org/job/Kotti/42/TOXENV=py27/console

0.2.7 - 2011-11-20

• Add ‘PasteScript’ dependency.

• Fix #11 where ‘python setup.py test’ would look into a hard-coded ‘bin’ directory.

• Structural analysis documentation. (Unfinished; in ‘analysis’ directory during development. Will be moved to main docs when finished.)

0.2.6 - 2011-11-17

• Add Node.__annotations__ convenience attribute.

  Node.__annotations__ will wrap the annotations dict in such a way that both item and attribute access are possible. It’ll also record changes to dicts inside dicts and mark the parent __annotations__ attribute as dirty.

• Add a welcome page.

• Delete the demo added in version 0.2.4.

0.2.5 - 2011-11-14

• Add ‘TemplateAPI.render_template’; allow templates to be rendered conveniently from templates.

0.2.4 - 2011-11-13

• Adjust for Pyramid 1.2: INI file, pyramid_tm, Wsgiref server, pcreate and pserve. (MO)

• Add Kotti Demo source and documentation.

0.2.3 - 2011-10-28

• Node.__getitem__ will now also accept a tuple as key.

  folder['1', '2'] is the same as folder['1']['2'], just more efficient.

• Added a new cache decorator based on repoze.lru.

0.2.2 - 2011-10-10

• Change the function signature of kotti.authn_policy_factory, kotti.authz_policy_factory and kotti.session_factory to include all settings from the configuration file.

0.2.1 - 2011-09-29

• Minor changes to events setup code to ease usage in tests.

0.2 - 2011-09-16

• No changes.

0.2a2 - 2011-09-05

• Fix templates to be compatible with Chameleon 2. Also, require Chameleon>=2.

• Require pyramid>=1.2. Also, enable pyramid_debugtoolbar for development.ini profile.

0.2a1 - 2011-08-29

• Improve database schema for Nodes. Split Node class into Node and Content.

  This change is backward incompatible in that existing content types in your code will need to subclass Content instead of Node. The example in the docs has been updated. Also, the underlying database schema has changed.

• Improve user database hashing and local roles storage.

• Compatibility fix for Pyramid 1.2.