Pylons, the Journey So Far

Tuesday, 08 August 2006

After I started "getting" pylons, I've covered quite a bit of ground.

Chiselman, my attemp at converting this textpattern blog to pylons is giving me a lot of opportunities to learn more about myghty, sqlalchemy and routes. Since blogging tools are a known domain, I'm able to hack away.

To sum up my journey so far, I've been able to do these:

• use sqlalchemy [even in non trivial cases]
• myghty - components, autohandlers, flags, filters
• routes - mostly intuitive, have not bumped into any walls so far ;)
• create RSS feeds for the blog. This took all of 20 minutes. That was awesome. I sort of wrote the Feeds controller while having lunch ;)
• Used Kid templating along with Myghty. Successfully mapped an iCal event to a microformat event. Small, yet satisfying to know that I can use kid whenever I need it.
• got Formencode and SQLAlchemy working with Pylons using Ben's Tutorial.
• use third party libraries - pymarkdown, pytextile, pydelicious
• got yahoo Search API integrated into site search.

Troublesome areas:

• myghty unicode issues in rendering kannada fonts. `.encode('utf-8') is not consistent. :(
• was not able to get formencode working with my comment form. Calling Render('/commentform.myt') renders the whole page inside the existing page. Perhaps, I should try inherit=None flag...