Planetary Ponderings

Yesterday I looked at very simple theming in Pylons, and mentioned that I'd prefer loading the current theme from the database rather than the configuration file. So this evening I decided to see if I could achieve that.

For a while I've been thinking about how to achieve themes in some of my Pylons applications, and just today I was looking around in my environment.py file, and saw the configuration of the templates and public directories. That gave me an idea, can I load a theme directory from the configuration file and use it in there?

I had a bit of a false start initially, I thought that I could just use the config object as I do elsewhere in my application, but that didn't want to work. Eventually I found the solution: the app_conf object.

This is how my code now looks:

Yup, Project HQ is making some nice progress, thanks to Python and the SQLAlchemy database library. SQLAlchemy really makes dealing with the database very easy.

Most recently I've been implementing an access control system that makes use of permissions and roles. SQLAlchemy makes dealing with this a breeze, and Pylons makes implementing it in the application very simple and easy. I think the most complicated part will be the roles and permissions management interface!

I previously blogged about openpm.org, my open source project management system which I'm writing in Python and Pylons. Unfortunately I could not get hold of the domain name due to a domain squatter, so I decided to take the easy route and rename the project.

I've just committed the first few snippets of code to subversion for yet another open source project. This time it's a project management app that I'm modeling after Basecamp from 37signals and activeCollab from a51 development.