Hi all, A little while ago, I needed to write a number of simple static websites. I would have done everything in pure HTML if it would not have been for the site navigation: adding a single page would have forced me to edit the menu of all existing pages. It was clear that the pure HTML approach does not scale.
So I set out for the django template engine, instead: I wrote a base template that takes care of the design and some simple context processors for the menu. Then, I created a directory hierarchy with all the content pages. I decided to write the content pages equally as templates which extend the base template an redefine just 2 blocks of the base template. Writing a simple URL dispatcher in my view, I was able to map the URL layout one-to-one against my template directory: for each URL, get the corresponding template from the page-directory and render it, with the menu being filled in by the context managers. Next, I wrote a small shell-script that would traverse my page-"template" directory, curl my local webserver for the corresponding URL and save the result in another directory, such that the outcome is a simple static website. The framework -- which took me only about two hours from start to finish -- is exactly what I wanted. My constrains are that individual content pages should be accessible through the file system (no DB), and the final static sites can be served from a webserver that does not run django. Now, however, I would like to add a web interface (running on an intranet server) with which admins are able to (a) edit the content pages, and (b) generate static sites and deploy them on the internet server that lacks django. So, I spend the day writing some pages that allow me to load the template content into HTML forms and methods to safe them back to the disk. Again, the basic functionality works quite nicely. I realize, however, that it would take a lot of effort to get a backend that is as smooth and professional as the one that comes with django already. So rather than reinventing the wheel, I was wondering, if it would be possible to define a customized model class, that (a) populates its fields from a file rather than the database, (b) has customized fields that wrap the block/endblock parts in the associated template and e.g. employ TinyMCE for editing in the backend, and (c) writes the result back to the corresponding file. Finally, the query methods (e.g. Model.get_all_objects) have to traverse the filesystem rather than hitting a database. I googled for django apps that would offer such a functionality, but could not dig up anything alike. Not knowing the internals of django's Model class yet, I would appreciate your judgment on the feasibility of this approach, caveats and pitfalls that I am not aware of, design alternatives for such database-free models, or pointers to existing solutions that I have not found. Thanks! - harold - --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django users" group. To post to this group, send email to django-users@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
