Re: Mantissa Wiki Tutorial

On 2/16/08, Robert Gravina <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> 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 Is it just that the wiki example is out of date?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 Robert, even though (as JP said) this tutorial may be out of date, I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.

Definitely not :-) In fact, quite the opposite. We're making it easier
to use :-)

> > 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.
>

That's great! Thanks for offering to be volunteered ;-)

d