A short introduction Kotti CMS, a Pyramid powered CMS developed by Plone developers

1. HI!
 TIBERIU ICHIM
12+ years experience with Plone
2+ years experience with Kotti

2. KOTTI 101
A short introduction to the
Web Application FrameworkKotti

3. IN THIS PRESENTATION
What is Kotti?
First impressions
Overview of features
Major alternatives
Advantages and drawbacks
Kotti in the future

4. WHAT IS KOTTI?

5. Started in 2011, at a Plone conference
Developers with common history: Plone
Developed in several sprints
Already stable for many years

6. BSD licensed
1.0.0 in January 2015
current version: 1.2.0
~9k downloads per month
still small, but
active, healthy and welcoming community

7. fast
light
flexible
well tested

8. SCREENSHOTS

15. CODE SAMPLES

16. CREATING AN ADDON

17. CUSTOM CONTENT TYPE

18.  THE NODE CLASS
adjacency list pattern
parent
children
single root node => node tree
dictionary protocol

19. DICTIONARY PROTOCOL

20. TRAVERSAL

21. JOINED TABLE INHERITANCE
class hierarchy is broken up among dependent tables
each model class has its own table
that table only includes attributes local to that class

22. POLYMORPHIC QUERIES

23. VIEWS
SIMPLEST VIEW ATTACHED TO A CONTENT TYPE

24. TEMPLATE

25. SCHEMA DEFINITION: FORM CREATION, VALIDATION

26. ADD / EDIT FORMS

27. CONFIGURATION

28. CHOICES MADE BY KOTTI

29. PYRAMID

30. probably the most advanced ORM for Python
database agnostic
has many nice, useful features
hybrid properties
association proxies
ordering list
transactions integrated to pyramid request lifecycle

31. BOOTSTRAPCSS
has all the components for modern UIs
responsive
well known
easy to customize

33. COLANDER & DEFORM

34. COLANDER
define data schema
validate & deserialize
HTML forms
JSON
XML
serialize Python structures to
strings
mappings
lists

35. DEFORM
render HTML forms from structures serialized by Colander
outputs Bootstrap 3 forms (Deform 2)

36. REPOZE.WORKFLOW

37. a content workflow system
states define
role / permission mapping
transitions define
from_state
to_state
required_permission
guards

38. FILEDEPOT

39. storing and serving files in web applications
multiple backends
local filesystem
S3
GridFS
roll your own
integrates with SQLAlchemy
files are handled like a plain model attribute
transaction aware

40. ... and many others:
Bleach
Babel
Alembic
py.test
jQuery
etc.

41. OVERVIEW OF FEATURES
User friendly
Developer friendly

42. USER FRIENDLY

43. BUILTIN CONTENT TYPES
Document
File
Image

44. USER INTERFACE
create content
edit content
delete
change state
folder contents view for batch operations
Obviously inspired by Plone

45. ...
workflows
security: roles, permissions, groups, sharing tab
user management
multi file upload
editors can choose which view is used on any content
item

46. BUILT FOR DEVELOPERS
Simplicity
Traversal
Easy polymorphism

47. ...
Transactions
easy configuration from .ini or python code
flexible user input sanitization

48. ...
events system
flexible blob storage
i18n interface

49. ...
slots (like viewlets)
inlining views
macros
override templates (like z3c.jbot)

50. ...
95% coverage of python code
scale data from single file to replicated cluster
able to use countless other pyramid extensions

51. ALTERNATIVE TO...
Plone
Django
SubstanceD

52. PLONE
fully featured CMS
many add-ons
TTW development
well established, large community

54. many many features
heavy on resources
hard to learn and understand
over 300 packages

55. MANY COMPETING TECHNOLOGIES
For models and schemas:
CMF
Archetypes
Dexterity
zope.schema

56. ...
Package infrastructure:
Zope2
ZCA
Grok

57. ...
Presentation layer:
Diazo
browser views
portal_view_customizations
portal_skins

58. ...
Forms:
CMFFormController
Archetypes
zope.formlib
z3c.form
plone.autoform

59. KOTTI VS. PLONE
Plone is source of inspiration
more similar to CMF in scope
no application server, only one global site
no local settings
no need for GenericSetup
no need for most portal_* utilities
native SQL indexing, no need for portal_catalog
obviously no TTW development

60. DJANGO
many add-ons
large community
not quite a CMS
weird for Zope/Plone developer

61. SUBSTANCED
very good pedigree
similar features on the surface
ZODB vs SQLAlchemy
has undo, audit log

62. KOTTI, ON ITS OWN
Advantages
Drawbacks

63. ADVANTAGES

64. Best set of core libraries
pyramid
sqlalchemy
deform

65. Avoid burnout
smaller dev stack
smaller time in server startup
smaller time in testing
no lengthy builds

66. Knowledge transfer
Easier to dive into Plone if you know Kotti

67. ... but if you're already a Plone developer
Zope Page Templates
slots, like viewlets
ZCA & .zcml
many concepts that are similar or reimplemented

68. DRAWBACKS

69. no undo or versioning, yet
small number of Kotti extensions.
smaller number of builtin features
not tweakable by editors
No:
TTW content types
composable layouts
portlet management

70. THE FUTURE
will always stay
“lean and mean in all of the right ways”

71. the core is stable
python 3 support (almost done)
undo/versioning, using sqlalchemy-continuum
REST api (partially) implementing JSONAPI
split up some functionality from core

72. WHERE TO GO NEXT
Kotti documentation website
github.com/Kotti/kotti.git
on IRC