Re: Mantissa Wiki Tutorial

On Feb 17, 2008, at 12:53 AM, Duncan McGreggor wrote:

> On 2/16/08, Robert Gravina <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Just working through this Wiki tutorial:
>> http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/MantissaWikiTutorial
>>
>> After starting up Mantissa and while its trying to bring up the login
>> page, I see this traceback:
>>
>>            File "/Users/rgravina/sync/workspace/LearningMantissa/ 
>> Wiki/
>> xmantissa/plugins/wikioff.py", line 3, in <module>
>>              from xmantissa import website, offering, provisioning
>>          exceptions.ImportError: cannot import name provisioning
>>
>> I've tried this with both Mantissa 0.6.16 and trunk.
>>
>> Is it just that the wiki example is out of date?
>>
>> Robert
>
> Robert, even though (as JP said) this tutorial may be out of date, I
> want you to know that we are doing a couple things right now:
>   1) Improving the overall Mantissa API, and
>   2) Creating a new Mantissa tutorial.
>
> Among the many benefits of the API improvements, you will find that it
> takes fewer steps (lines of code) to create applications.
> Additionally, how the different parts of Mantissa interoperate will
> also be much more clear.

That's great.. at the moment I'm not sure where to start :) What I  
intend to use Mantissa for is as a web development framework - mostly  
creating data-driven sites with admin backends for clients, but  
occasionally something more complex that you could possibly call a  
web application. Most will be the former, though. I've had it with  
the complexity of Zope/Plone, and Nevow looks like the best of the  
bunch of the lighter frameworks like Django, Pylons etc.

The reason I *think* I need to use Mantissa, is because I want to  
create these administration backends - basically something where the  
client can log in, and use web forms to maintain their dynamic  
content - e.g. blog entries, press releases, articles etc. I can use  
one of the forms libraries for Nevow for this, but there's still the  
issue of putting these behind a login and setting up user accounts.

I was talking with JP about this yesterday, and I get the impression  
that Mantissa will provide a lot of the functionality I'd have to  
create myself if I used just Nevow + Axiom. But, if Mantissa is  
adding more complexity than I need - and I should be using Nevow and  
Axiom only, please let me know.

> We're hoping to have a first draft of the tutorial out a couple weeks
> after PyCon this (about a month and a half from now). The tutorial
> will be written in a branch, however, and will document the improved
> API (in so much as a tutorial is geared to do so). If you are
> interested in assisting us in its creation and/or fine-tuning as a
> bleeding-edge user, let us know :-)

Definitely. I'd be more than happy to contribute, as I've been  
leeching of Divmod for some time now :) I'd like to get more familiar  
with Mantissa over this time too, so it works out great for me. I'll  
start by using it on a low-risk web project.

Robert