Design

Following is a quick overview of the design of our wiki application, to help us understand the changes that we will be making as we work through the tutorial.

Overall

We choose to use reStructuredText markup in the wiki text. Translation from reStructuredText to HTML is provided by the widely used docutils Python module. We will add this module in the dependency list on the project setup.py file.

Models

The root resource named Wiki will be a mapping of wiki page names to page resources. The page resources will be instances of a Page class and they store the text content.

URLs like /PageName will be traversed using Wiki[ PageName ] => page, and the context that results is the page resource of an existing page.

To add a page to the wiki, a new instance of the page resource is created and its name and reference are added to the Wiki mapping.

A page named FrontPage containing the text This is the front page, will be created when the storage is initialized, and will be used as the wiki home page.

Views

There will be three views to handle the normal operations of adding, editing, and viewing wiki pages, plus one view for the wiki front page. Two templates will be used, one for viewing, and one for both adding and editing wiki pages.

As of version 1.5 Pyramid no longer ships with templating systems. In this tutorial, we will use Chameleon. Chameleon is a variant of ZPT, which is an XML-based templating language.

Security

We'll eventually be adding security to our application. The components we'll use to do this are below.

• USERS, a dictionary mapping userids to their corresponding passwords.

• GROUPS, a dictionary mapping userids to a list of groups to which they belong.

• groupfinder, an authorization callback that looks up USERS and GROUPS. It will be provided in a new security.py file.

• An ACL is attached to the root resource. Each row below details an ACE:

  Action	Principal	Permission
  Allow	Everyone	View
  Allow	group:editors	Edit

• Permission declarations are added to the views to assert the security policies as each request is handled.

Two additional views and one template will handle the login and logout tasks.

Summary

The URL, context, actions, template and permission associated to each view are listed in the following table:

URL	View	Context	Action	Template	Permission
/	view_wiki	Wiki	Redirect to /FrontPage
/PageName	view_page [1]	Page	Display existing page [2]	view.pt	view
/PageName/edit_page	edit_page	Page	Display edit form with existing content. If the form was submitted, redirect to /PageName	edit.pt	edit
/add_page/PageName	add_page	Wiki	Create the page PageName in storage, display the edit form without content. If the form was submitted, redirect to /PageName	edit.pt	edit
/login	login	Wiki, Forbidden [3]	Display login form. If the form was submitted, authenticate. If authentication succeeds, redirect to the page that we came from. If authentication fails, display login form with "login failed" message.	login.pt
/logout	logout	Wiki	Redirect to /FrontPage

[1]

This is the default view for a Page context when there is no view name.

[2]

Pyramid will return a default 404 Not Found page if the page PageName does not exist yet.

[3]

pyramid.exceptions.Forbidden is reached when a user tries to invoke a view that is not authorized by the authorization policy.