Welcome! This tutorial will show you how to create a simple wiki with TurboGears 2. It is designed to be your first experience with TurboGears 2.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of a wiki you might want to check out the Wikipedia entry. Basically, a wiki is an easily-editable collaborative web content system that makes it trivial to link to pages and create new pages. Like other wiki systems, we are going to use CamelCase words to designate links to pages.
If you have trouble with this tutorial ask for help on the TurboGears discussion list, or on the IRC channel #turbogears. We’re a friendly bunch and, depending what time of day you post, you’ll get your answer in a few minutes to a few hours. If you search the mailing list or the web in general you’ll probably get your answer even faster. Please don’t post your problem reports as comments on this or any of the following pages of the tutorial. Comments are for suggestions for improvement of the docs, not for seeking support.
If you want to see the final version you can download a copy of the wiki code.
To go through this tutorial, you’ll need:
Python 2.4, 2.5 or 2.6. Note that Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes with Python 2.5 pre-installed; for 10.4 and before, follow Macintosh in the above link.
docutils 0.4 or later,
which is used for the wiki’s formatting. docutils is not a required
part of TurboGears, but is needed for this tutorial. Install it with:
$ easy_install docutils
When using easy_install it doesn’t matter what directory you’re in.
If you don’t have easy_install you only need to run
http://peak.telecommunity.com/dist/ez_setup.py from any directory.
A web browser.
Your favorite editor.
Two command line windows (you only need one, but two is nicer).
A database. Python 2.5 comes with sqlite, so if you have
Python 2.5, don’t do anything (though you will need sqlite3.0+ if
you want to browse the database from the command line). If you’re
running Python 2.4, your best bet is sqlite 3.2+ with pysqlite 2.0+. Install it
with:
$ easy_install pysqlite
Optional: If you’re not aware of it, you may also find the
ipython shell to be helpful. It supports attribute tab completion for
many objects (which can help you find the method you’re searching for)
and can display contextual help if you append a question mark onto the
end of an object or method. You can do the same in the standard shell
with the dir() and help() functions, but ipython is more
convenient. ipython has a number of other convenient features, like
dropping into the debugger on an error; take a look at the ipython docs
for more information. You can install it with:
$ easy_install ipython
This tutorial doesn’t cover Python at all. Check the Python Documentation page for more coverage of Python.
TurboGears provides a suite of tools for working with projects by
adding several commands to the Python command line tool paster. A
few will be touched upon in this tutorial. (Check the Command
Line Reference for a full listing.) The first
tool you’ll need is quickstart, which initializes a TurboGears
project. Go to a command line window and run the following command:
$ paster quickstart
You’ll be prompted for the name of the project (this is the pretty name that human beings would appreciate), and the name of the package (this is the less-pretty name that Python will like). Here’s what our choices for this tutorial look like:
$ paster quickstart
Enter project name: Wiki 20
Enter package name [wiki20]: wiki20
Do you need authentication and authorization in this project? [yes] no
We recommend you use the names given here: this documentation looks for files in directories based on these names.
Now paster will spit out a bunch of stuff:
Selected and implied templates:
tg.devtools#turbogears2 TurboGears 2.1 Standard Quickstart Template
...etc...
reading manifest file 'Wiki_20.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
reading manifest template 'MANIFEST.in'
writing manifest file 'Wiki_20.egg-info/SOURCES.txt'
This creates a few files in a directory tree just below your current directory. You will notice that the quickstart created a directory without spaces for convenience: project name “Wiki 20” resulted in the directory name “Wiki-20”. Go in there and take a look around:
$ cd Wiki-20
Now to be able to run the project you will need to install it and
its dependencies. This can be quickly achieved by running from
inside the Wiki-20 directory:
$ python setup.py develop
Then paster provides a simple mechanism for running a TurboGears
project. Again from the Wiki-20 directory, run this command:
$ paster serve --reload development.ini
The --reload flag means that changes that you make in the project
will automatically cause the server to restart itself. This way you
immediately see the results.
Point your browser to http://localhost:8080, and you’ll see a nice welcome page. You now have a working project! And you can access the project from within the python/ipython shell by typing:
$ paster shell development.ini
If ipython is installed within your virtual environment, it will be the default shell. Right now, we’re not going to do much with the shell, but you may find other tutorials which use it to add data to the database.
If you take a look at the code that quickstart created, you’ll see
everything necessary to get up and running. Here, we’ll look at the
two files directly involved in displaying this welcome page.
TurboGears follows the Model-View-Controller paradigm (a.k.a. “MVC”), as do most modern web frameworks like Rails, Django, Struts, etc.
Wiki-20/wiki20/controllers/root.py is the code that causes the
welcome page to be produced. After the imports the first line of code
creates our main controller class by inheriting from TurboGears’
BaseController:
class RootController(BaseController):
The TurboGears 2 controller is a simple object publishing system; you
write controller methods and @expose() them to the web. In our
case, there’s a single controller method called index. As you
might guess, this name is not accidental; this becomes the default
page you’ll get if you go to this URL without specifying a particular
destination, just like you’ll end up at index.html on an ordinary
web server if you don’t give a specific file name. You’ll also go to
this page if you explicitly name it, with
http://localhost:8080/index. We’ll see other controller methods
later in the tutorial so this naming system will become clear.
The @expose() decorator tells TurboGears which template to use to
render the page. Our @expose() specifies:
@expose('wiki20.templates.index')
This gives TurboGears the template to use, including the path
information (the .html extension is implied). We’ll look at this
file shortly.
Each controller method returns a dictionary, as you can see at the end
of the index method. TG takes the key:value pairs in this
dictionary and turns them into local variables that can be used in the
template.
Wiki-20/wiki20/templates/index.html is the template specified by the
@expose() decorator, so it formats what you view on the welcome
screen. Look at the file; you’ll see that it’s standard XHTML with
some simple namespaced attributes. This makes it very
designer-friendly, and well-behaved design tools will respect all the
Genshi attributes and tags. You can even open it directly in your
browser.
Genshi directives are elements and/or attributes in the template that
are usually prefixed with py:. They can affect how the template is
rendered in a number of ways: Genshi provides directives for
conditionals and looping, among others. We’ll see some simple Genshi
directives in the sections on Editing pages and
Adding views.
Next, we’ll set up our data model, and create a database.
quickstart produced a directory for our model in
Wiki-20/wiki20/model/. This directory contains an __init__.py
file, which makes that directory name into a python module (so you can
use import model).
Since a wiki is basically a linked collection of pages, we’ll define a
Page class as the name of our model. Create a new file called
page.py in the Wiki-20/wiki20/model/ directory:
from sqlalchemy import *
from sqlalchemy.orm import mapper
from wiki20.model import metadata
# Database table definition
# See: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/04/sqlexpression.html
pages_table = Table("pages", metadata,
Column("id", Integer, primary_key=True),
Column("pagename", Text, unique=True),
Column("data", Text)
)
# Python class definition
class Page(object):
def __init__(self, pagename, data):
self.pagename = pagename
self.data = data
# Mapper
# See: http://www.sqlalchemy.org/docs/04/mappers.html
page_mapper = mapper(Page, pages_table)
In order to easily use our model within the application, modify the
Wiki-20/wiki20/model/__init__.py file to add Page and
pages_table to the module. Add the following line at the end of
the file:.
from wiki20.model.page import Page, pages_table
Warning
It’s very important that this line is at the end because
pages_table requires the rest of the model to be initialized
before it can be imported:
Let’s investigate our model a little more. The MetaData object is
automatically created by the paste command inside the
__init__.py file. It’s a “single point of truth” that keeps all
the information necessary to connect to and use the database. It
includes the location of the database, connection information and the
tables that are in that database. When you pass the metadata object to
the various objects in your project they initialize themselves using
that metadata.
In this case, the metadata object configures itself using the development.ini file, which we’ll look at in the next section.
The SQLAlchemy Table object defines what a single table looks like
in the database, and adds any necessary constraints (so, for example,
even if your database doesn’t enforce uniqueness, SQLAlchemy will
attempt to do so). The first argument in the Table constructor is
the name of that table inside the database. Next is the aforementioned
metadata object followed by the definitions for each Column
object. As you can see, Column objects are defined in the same way that you
define them within a database: name, type, and constraints.
The Table object provides the representation of a database table,
but we want to just work with objects, so we create an extremely
simple class to represent our objects within TurboGears. The above
idiom is quite common: you create a very simple class like Page
with nothing in it, and add all the interesting stuff using
mapper(), which attaches the Table object to our class.
Note that it’s also possible to start with an existing database, but that’s a more advanced topic that we won’t cover in this tutorial. If you would like more information on how to do that, check out AutoGenerating Model Code with SQLAutocode.
By default, projects created with quickstart are configured to use
a very simple SQLite database (however, TurboGears 2 supports most
popular databases). This configuration is controlled by the
development.ini file in the root directory (Wiki-20, for our
project).
Search down until you find the [app:main] section in
development.ini, and then look for sqlalchemy.url. You should
see this:
sqlalchemy.url = sqlite:///%(here)s/devdata.db
Turbogears will automatically replace the %(here)s variable with
the parent directory of this file, so for our example it will produce
sqlite:///Wiki-20/devdata.db. You won’t see the devdata.db file
now because we haven’t yet initialized the database.
Before you can use your database, you need to initialize it and add
some data. There’s built in support for this in TurboGears using
paster setup-app. The quickstart template gives you a basic
template database setup inside the websetup/boostrap.py file
which by default creates two users, one manager group and one
manage permission:
We need to update the file to create our FrontPage data just before
the DBSession.flush() command by adding:
page = model.Page("FrontPage", "initial data")
model.DBSession.add(page)
The resulting boostrap file will look like:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Setup the wiki20 application"""
import logging
from tg import config
from wiki20 import model
import transaction
def bootstrap(command, conf, vars):
"""Place any commands to setup wiki20 here"""
# <websetup.bootstrap.before.auth
from sqlalchemy.exc import IntegrityError
try:
u = model.User()
u.user_name = u'manager'
u.display_name = u'Example manager'
u.email_address = u'manager@somedomain.com'
u.password = u'managepass'
model.DBSession.add(u)
g = model.Group()
g.group_name = u'managers'
g.display_name = u'Managers Group'
g.users.append(u)
model.DBSession.add(g)
p = model.Permission()
p.permission_name = u'manage'
p.description = u'This permission give an administrative right to the bearer'
p.groups.append(g)
model.DBSession.add(p)
u1 = model.User()
u1.user_name = u'editor'
u1.display_name = u'Example editor'
u1.email_address = u'editor@somedomain.com'
u1.password = u'editpass'
model.DBSession.add(u1)
page = model.Page("FrontPage", "initial data")
model.DBSession.add(page)
model.DBSession.flush()
transaction.commit()
except IntegrityError:
print 'Warning, there was a problem adding your auth data, it may have already been added:'
import traceback
print traceback.format_exc()
transaction.abort()
print 'Continuing with bootstrapping...'
# <websetup.bootstrap.after.auth>
If you’re familiar with SQLAlchemy this should look pretty standard to you. One thing to note is that we use:
transaction.commit()
Where you’re used to seeing DBSession.commit() we use
transaction.commit(). This calls the transaction manager which
helps us to support cross database transactions, as well as
transactions in non relational databases, but ultimately in the case
of SQLAlchemy it calls DBSession.commit() just like you might if
you were doing it directly.
Now run the paster setup-app command:
$ paster setup-app development.ini
You’ll see output, but you should not see error messages. At this
point your database is created and has some initial data in it, which
you can verify by looking at Wiki-20/devdata.db. The file should
exist and have a nonzero size.
That takes care of the “M” in MVC. Next is the “C”: controllers.
Controllers are the code that figures out which page to display, what data to grab from the model, how to process it, and finally hands off that processed data to a template.
quickstart has already created some basic controller code for us
at Wiki-20/wiki20/controllers/root.py. Here’s what it looks like
now:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.index')
def index(self):
"""Handle the front-page."""
return dict(page='index')
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
The first thing we need to do is uncomment the line that imports
DBSession.
Next we must import the Page class from our model. At the end of
the import block, add this line:
from wiki20.model.page import Page
Now we will change the template used to present the data, by changing
the @expose('wiki20.templates.index') line to:
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
This requires us to create a new template named page.html in the wiki20/templates directory; we’ll do this in the next section.
Now we must specify which page we want to see. To do this, add a
parameter to the index() method. Change the line after the
@expose decorator to:
def index(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
This tells the index() method to accept a parameter called
pagename, with a default value of "FrontPage".
Now let’s get that page from our data model. Put this line in the
body of index:
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
This line asks the SQLAlchemy database session object to run a query
for records with a pagename column equal to the value of the
pagename parameter passed to our controller method. The
.one() method assures that there is only one returned result;
normally a .query call returns a list of matching objects. We only
want one page, so we use .one().
Finally, we need to return a dictionary containing the page we
just looked up. When we say:
return dict(wikipage=page)
The returned dict will create a template variable called
wikipage that will evaluate to the page object that we looked
it up.
Here’s the whole file after incorporating the above modifications:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def index(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
Now our index() method fetches a record from the database
(creating an instance of our mapped Page class along the way), and
returns it to the template within a dictionary.
quickstart also created some templates for us in the
Wiki-20/wiki20/templates directory: master.html and index.html.
Back in our simple controller, we used @expose() to hand off a
dictionary of data to a template called 'wiki20.templates.index',
which corresponds to Wiki-20/wiki20/templates/index.html.
Take a look at the following line in index.html:
<xi:include href="master.html" />
This tells the index template to include the master
template. Using includes lets you easily maintain a cohesive look and
feel throughout your site by having each page include a common master
template.
Similarly the lines:
<xi:include href="header.html" />
<xi:include href="footer.html" />
Tell Genshi to pull in the headers and footers for the page.
Copy the contents of index.html into a new file called page.html. Now modify it for our purposes:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
<xi:include href="master.html" />
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" py:replace="''"/>
<title>${wikipage.pagename} - The TurboGears 2 Wiki</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="main_content">
<div style="float:right; width: 10em;"> Viewing
<!-- ##{PageName} -->
<span py:replace="wikipage.pagename">Page Name Goes Here</span>
<!-- ## -->
<br/>
You can return to the <a href="/">FrontPage</a>.
</div>
<!-- ##{PageContent} -->
<div py:replace="wikipage.data">Page text goes here.</div>
<!-- ## -->
<a href="/edit/${wikipage.pagename}">Edit this page</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
This is a basic XHTML page with three substitutions:
In the <title> tag, we substitute the name of the page, using
the pagename value of page. (Remember, wikipage is an
instance of our mapped Page class, which was passed in a
dictionary by our controller.)
In the second <div> element, we substitute the page name again
with Genshi’s py:replace:
<span py:replace="wikipage.pagename">Page Name Goes Here</span>
In the third <div>, we put in the contents of our``wikipage``:
<div py:replace="wikipage.data">Page text goes here.</div>
When you refresh the output web page you should see “initial data” displayed on the page.
Note
py.replace replaces the entire tag (including start and end tags) with the value of the variable provided.
For the curious…
Do you wonder what those html comments like ##{PageContent} are? They do not matter for this tutorial and are only to help the documentation (you’re soaking in it!) isolate certain lines of code to display, like above.
One of the fundamental features of a wiki is the ability to edit the page just by clicking “Edit This Page,” so we’ll create a template for editing. First, make a copy of page.html:
cd wiki20/templates
cp page.html edit.html
We need to replace the content with an editing form and ensure people
know this is an editing page. Here are the changes for edit.html.
Change the title in the header to reflect that we are editing the page:
<head> <meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" py:replace="''"/> <title>Editing: ${wikipage.pagename}</title> </head>
Change the div that displays the page:
<div py:replace="wikipage.data">Page text goes here.</div>
with a div that contains a standard HTML form:
<div> <form action="/save" method="post"> <input type="hidden" name="pagename" value="${wikipage.pagename}"/> <textarea name="data" py:content="wikipage.data" rows="10" cols="60"/> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Save"/> </form> </div> </div>
Now that we have our view, we need to update our controller in order
to display the form and handle the form submission. For displaying the
form, we’ll add an edit method to our controller in
Wiki-20/wiki20/controllers/root.py. The new root.py file looks
like this:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def index(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose(template="wiki20.templates.edit")
def edit(self, pagename):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
For now, the new method is identical to the index method; the only
difference is that the resulting dictionary is handed to the edit
template. To see it work, go to
http://localhost:8080/edit/FrontPage. However, this only works because
FrontPage already exists in our database; if you try to edit a new
page with a different name it will fail, which we’ll fix in a later
section.
Don’t click that save button yet! We still need to write that method.
When we displayed our wiki’s edit form in the last section, the form’s
action was /save. So, we need to make a method called
save in the Root class of our controller.
However, we’re also going to make another important change. Our
index method is only called when you either go to / or
/index. If you change the index method to the special method
default, then default will be automatically called whenever
nothing else matches. default will take the rest of the URL and
turn it into positional parameters.
Here’s our new version of root.py which includes both default
and save:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def default(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose(template="wiki20.templates.edit")
def edit(self, pagename):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
@expose()
def save(self, pagename, data, submit):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
page.data = data
redirect("/" + pagename)
Unlike the previous methods we’ve made, save just uses a plain
@expose() without any template specified. That’s because we’re
only redirecting the user back to the viewing page.
Although the page.data = data statement tells SQLAlchemy that you
intend to store the page data in the database, nothing happens until
the DBSession.flush() method is called. This is commonly referred
to as the “unit of work” pattern, and it’s an important structure for
database developers because it allows SQLAlchemy to combine many
operations into a single database update (or a minimized number of
updates if some changes depend upon earlier changes) and thus be much
more efficient in the database resources used.
SQLAlchemy also provides a DBSession.commit() method which flushes
and commits any changes you’ve made in a transaction. TurboGears 2
provides a flexible transaction management system that automates this
process wrapping each web request in its own transaction and
automatically rolling back that transaction if you get a python
exception, or return an HTTP error code as your response.
You don’t have to do anything to use this transaction management system, it should just work. So, you can now make changes and save the page we were editing, just like a real wiki.
Our wiki doesn’t yet have a way to link pages. A typical wiki will automatically create links for WikiWords when it finds them (WikiWords have also been described as WordsSmashedTogether). This sounds like a job for a regular expression.
Here’s the new version of root.py, which will be explained afterwards:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
import re
from docutils.core import publish_parts
wikiwords = re.compile(r"\b([A-Z]\w+[A-Z]+\w+)")
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def default(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
content = publish_parts(page.data, writer_name="html")["html_body"]
root = url('/')
content = wikiwords.sub(r'<a href="%s\1">\1</a>' % root, content)
return dict(content=content, wikipage=page)
@expose(template="wiki20.templates.edit")
def edit(self, pagename):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
@expose()
def save(self, pagename, data, submit):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
page.data = data
redirect("/" + pagename)
We need some additional imports, including re for regular
expressions and a method called publish_parts from docutils.
A WikiWord is a word that starts with an uppercase letter, has a
collection of lowercase letters and numbers followed by another
uppercase letter and more letters and numbers. The wikiwords
regular expression describes a WikiWord.
In default, the new lines begin with the use of publish_parts,
which is a utility that takes string input and returns a dictionary of
document parts after performing conversions; in our case, the
conversion is from Restructured Text to HTML. The input
(page.data) is in Restructured Text format, and the output format
(specified by writer_name="html") is in HTML. Selecting the
fragment part produces the document without the document title,
subtitle, docinfo, header, and footer.
You can configure TurboGears so that it doesn’t live at the root of a
site, so you can combine multiple TurboGears apps on a single
server. Using tg.url() creates relative links, so that your links
will continue to work regardless of how many apps you’re running.
The next line rewrites the content by finding any WikiWords and
substituting hyperlinks for those WikiWords. That way when you click
on a WikiWord, it will take you to that page. The r'string' means
‘raw string’, one that turns off escaping, which is mostly used in
regular expression strings to prevent you from having to double escape
slashes. The substitution may look a bit weird, but is more
understandable if you recognize that the %s gets substituted with
root, then the substitution is done which replaces the \1 with
the string matching the regex.
Note that default() is now returning a dict containing an
additional key-value pair: content=content. This will not break
wiki20.templates.page because that page is only looking for
page in the dictionary, however if we want to do something
interesting with the new key-value pair we’ll need to edit
wiki20.templates.page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
<xi:include href="master.html" />
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" py:replace="''"/>
<title>${wikipage.pagename} - The TurboGears 2 Wiki</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="main_content">
<div style="float:right; width: 10em;"> Viewing
<!-- ##{PageName} -->
<span py:replace="wikipage.pagename">Page Name Goes Here</span>
<!-- ## -->
<br/>
You can return to the <a href="/">FrontPage</a>.
</div>
<div py:replace="XML(content)">Formatted content goes here.</div>
<a href="/edit/${wikipage.pagename}">Edit this page</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Since content comes through as XML, we can strip it off using the
XML() function to produce plain text (try removing the function
call to see what happens).
To test the new version of the system, edit the data in your front page to include a WikiWord. When the page is displayed, you’ll see that it’s now a link. You probably won’t be surprised to find that clicking that link produces an error.
What if a Wiki page doesn’t exist? We’ll take a simple approach: if the page doesn’t exist, you get an edit page to use to create it.
In the default method, we’ll check to see if the page exists. If
it doesn’t, we’ll redirect to a new notfound method. We’ll add
this method after the index method and before the edit
method. Here are the changes we make to the controller:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
import re
from docutils.core import publish_parts
from sqlalchemy.exceptions import InvalidRequestError
wikiwords = re.compile(r"\b([A-Z]\w+[A-Z]+\w+)")
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def default(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
try:
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
except InvalidRequestError:
raise redirect("notfound", pagename = pagename)
content = publish_parts(page.data, writer_name="html")["html_body"]
root = url('/')
content = wikiwords.sub(r'<a href="%s\1">\1</a>' % root, content)
return dict(content=content, wikipage=page)
@expose(template="wiki20.templates.edit")
def edit(self, pagename):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
@expose()
def save(self, pagename, data, submit):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
page.data = data
redirect("/" + pagename)
@expose("wiki20.templates.edit")
def notfound(self, pagename):
page = Page(pagename=pagename, data="")
DBSession.add(page)
return dict(wikipage=page)
The default code changes illustrate the “better to beg forgiveness
than ask permission” pattern which is favored by most Pythonistas –
we first try to get the page and then deal with the exception by
redirecting to a method that will make a new page.
We’re also leaking a bit of our model into our controller. For a
larger project, we might create a facade in the model, but here we’ll
favor simplicity. Notice that we can use the redirect() to pass
parameters into the destination method.
As for the notfound method, the first two lines of the method add
a row to the page table. From there, the path is exactly the same it
would be for our edit method.
With these changes in place, we have a fully functional wiki. Give it a try! You should be able to create new pages now.
Most wikis have a feature that lets you view an index of the pages. To add one, we’ll start with a new template, pagelist.html. We’ll copy page.html so that we don’t have to write the boilerplate.
cd wiki20/templates
cp page.html pagelist.html
After editing, our pagelist.html looks like:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
<xi:include href="header.html" />
<xi:include href="sidebars.html" />
<xi:include href="footer.html" />
<xi:include href="master.html" />
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" py:replace="''"/>
<title>Page Listing - The TurboGears 2 Wiki</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="main_content">
<h1>All Pages</h1>
<ul>
<li py:for="pagename in pages">
<a href="${tg.url('/' + pagename)}"
py:content="pagename">Page Name Here.</a>
</li>
</ul>
Return to the <a href="/">FrontPage</a>.
</div>
</body>
</html>
The section in bold represents the Genshi code of interest. You can
guess that the py:for is a python for loop, modified to fit
into Genshi’s XML. It iterates through each of the pages (which
we’ll send in via the controller, using a modification you’ll see
next). For each one, Page Name Here is replaced by pagename,
as is the URL. You can learn more about the Genshi templating
engine at their site.
We must also modify the controller to implement pagelist and to
create and pass pages to our template:
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""Main Controller"""
from tg import expose, flash, require, url, request, redirect
from pylons.i18n import ugettext as _, lazy_ugettext as l_
from wiki20.lib.base import BaseController
from wiki20.model import DBSession, metadata
from wiki20.controllers.error import ErrorController
from wiki20.model import Page
import re
from docutils.core import publish_parts
from sqlalchemy.exceptions import InvalidRequestError
wikiwords = re.compile(r"\b([A-Z]\w+[A-Z]+\w+)")
__all__ = ['RootController']
class RootController(BaseController):
"""
The root controller for the Wiki-20 application.
All the other controllers and WSGI applications should be mounted on this
controller. For example::
panel = ControlPanelController()
another_app = AnotherWSGIApplication()
Keep in mind that WSGI applications shouldn't be mounted directly: They
must be wrapped around with :class:`tg.controllers.WSGIAppController`.
"""
error = ErrorController()
@expose('wiki20.templates.page')
def default(self, pagename="FrontPage"):
try:
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
except InvalidRequestError:
raise redirect("notfound", pagename = pagename)
content = publish_parts(page.data, writer_name="html")["html_body"]
root = url('/')
content = wikiwords.sub(r'<a href="%s\1">\1</a>' % root, content)
return dict(content=content, wikipage=page)
@expose(template="wiki20.templates.edit")
def edit(self, pagename):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose('wiki20.templates.about')
def about(self):
"""Handle the 'about' page."""
return dict(page='about')
@expose()
def save(self, pagename, data, submit):
page = DBSession.query(Page).filter_by(pagename=pagename).one()
page.data = data
redirect("/" + pagename)
@expose("wiki20.templates.edit")
def notfound(self, pagename):
page = Page(pagename=pagename, data="")
DBSession.add(page)
return dict(wikipage=page)
@expose("wiki20.templates.pagelist")
def pagelist(self):
pages = [page.pagename for page in DBSession.query(Page)]
return dict(pages=pages)
Here, we select all of the Page objects from the database, and
order them by pagename.
We can also modify page.html so that the link to the page list is available on every page:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
xmlns:py="http://genshi.edgewall.org/"
xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude">
<xi:include href="master.html" />
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type" py:replace="''"/>
<title>${wikipage.pagename} - The TurboGears 2 Wiki</title>
</head>
<body>
<div class="main_content">
<div style="float:right; width: 10em;"> Viewing
<!-- ##{PageName} -->
<span py:replace="wikipage.pagename">Page Name Goes Here</span>
<!-- ## -->
<br/>
You can return to the <a href="/">FrontPage</a>.
</div>
<div py:replace="XML(content)">Formatted content goes here.</div>
<a href="/edit/${wikipage.pagename}">Edit this page</a>
<a href="/pagelist">View the page list</a>
</div>
</body>
</html>
You can see your pagelist by clicking the link on a page or by going directly to http://localhost:8080/pagelist.
Now that you have a working Wiki, there are a number of further places to explore:
If you had any problems with this tutorial, or have ideas on how to make it better, please let us know on the mailing list! Suggestions are almost always incorporated.