.. title: Wedding site: using Pylons
.. slug: pylons
.. date: 2006-04-14 14:21:49
.. tags: dev, python, web

<p>
  I'm building a wedding site that contains mostly static material
  but has some material that's reminsicent of CMS and some material
  that's database-driven, too.
</p>
<p>
  I surveyed the scene of Python web-frameworks and settled on 
  <a href="http://pylonshq.com/">Pylons</a> for various reasons but 
  mostly because:
</p>
<ul>
  <li>I liked their website.  It was easy to figure out what it does, how
      it's architected, and I can find what I'm looking for.
  <li>It's built on Paste.  Paste is great infrastructure.
  <li>It supports WSGI.  Makes it easier to interoperate with other
      applications.
  <li>The project is very healthy.
</ul>
<p>
  I've spent 40 minutes or so fiddling with the site so far with only a
  few minor issues which required me to go poking through documentation.  
  One of the issues is that I have a series of templates in my templates/ 
  dir and I uncommented out the commented out code in the 
  <code>template.py</code> controller so it's like this:
</p>
<pre class="code">
from weddingwww.lib.base import *

class TemplateController(BaseController):
    def view(self, url):
        from pkg_resources import resource_exists
        if resource_exists('weddingwww', url+'.myt'):
            m.subexec(url+'.myt')
        else:
            m.abort(404, "File not found '%s'" % url)
</pre>
<p>
  That doesn't seem to work as I'd expect.  For example, if I go to 
  <code>http://localhost:5000/meeting</code>, the <code>url</code> parameter
  ends up as <code>meeting</code> but the resources_exist returns a false
  even though there's a <code>meeting.myt</code> file in my templates
  directory.
</p>
<p>
  After fiddling with this and trying to figure out where pkg_resources
  is defined, I just commented the code out and changed it to this:
</p>
<pre class="code">
from weddingwww.lib.base import *

class TemplateController(BaseController):
    def view(self, url):
        m.subexec(url+'.myt')
</pre>
<p>
  which obviously does the wrong thing if the file doesn't exist.
</p>