This document discusses migrating the NASA science website (science.nasa.gov) from its existing manually maintained HTML format to the Repoze BFG content management system. Repoze BFG provides a lightweight and fast Python-based system using the same Zope Object Database and catalog search as Plone. The document outlines how the NASA site content could be modeled as objects in the ZODB and rendered using traversal and templates in Repoze BFG.

1. Migrating a
public NASA site
to Repoze BFG
Chris Shenton
koansys.com

2. Talk Overview
• Science@NASA
• Repoze BFG
• S@N in BFG

3. science@nasa
• science.nasa.gov
• 13 years of stories
• 1.8 million visits/month
• manually maintained
• varying HTML formats over time
• no built-in search

4. s@n varying html
• 2009

5. s@n varying html
• 2003

6. s@n varying html
• 1996

7. CMS Wanted
• Folders, Pages
• Files, Images
• Search
• TTW Editor
• Permissions per object

8. Existing Plone Site
• nasascience.nasa.gov
• too complex

9. New Plone Site?
• Plone3’s become painful :-(

10. Repoze BFG?
• Same Zope Object Database
• Similar ZPT Templates
• Same Catalog index, search
• Tiny
• Fast
• Easy to learn

11. Repoze BFG
• http://bfg.repoze.org/
• “Zope with the serial numbers filed off”
• Chris McDonough’s 4th implementation
• 100% test coverage
• Excellent, complete documenation
• Good fit for CMS-shaped data
• ZODB
• Traversal

12. ZODB
• Persistent object store
• Python objects
• Dictionaries, attributes
• children = page.items()
• parent = page.__parent__

13. ZODB for
lightly structured data
recipes
Spanish seafood
paella sangria grouper squid
on bbq cava red

14. ZODB: flexible
recipes
Spanish seafood
paella sangria grouper squid
on bbq cava red
tasting
photo
notes

15. Traversal:
the way we think
/recipes/Spanish/sangria/cava recipes
/recipes/seafood/squid
Spanish seafood
paella sangria grouper squid
on bbq cava red

16. Traversal
We don’t need no stinking ORM

17. Models: just Python
• Folderish Page

18. Models: just Python
• File
• Image
• subclass
• blobs

19. Views: fill templates

20. View: add, edit

21. Templates
Chameleon: ZPT on steroids
• ZPT, TAL, METAL
• http://chameleon.repoze.org/docs/zpt/
• http://www.zope.org/Documentation/
Books/ZopeBook/2_6Edition/ZPT.stx
• http://wiki.zope.org/ZPT/
TALSpecification14

22. Templates: O-wrap
• define-slot

23. Templates: page view
• fill-slot

24. Catalog: index
• define indices

25. Catalog: search
• view

26. Import science@nasa
• wget site
• import html
• use xpaths

27. But will it blend?
• Live demo!