Lipstick on a Pig - European Plone Symposium 2009

Lipstick on a Pig Dynamically re-skinning a legacy .NET portal with python Matt Hamilton [email_address]

Introduction

Dynamically re-skinning a .NET portal site
Can't name the client
Portal for teachers in the UK
Aggregating content across legacy portal, Plone and Moodle

Who Am I

Technical Director of Netsight

Web development firm in UK

10 years experience with Zope/Plone
More of an integrator than core developer

I get involved in all those sticky projects of merging Plone in with other systems in an enterprise

Where Were We?

Existing Portal (1.0)

Five years old by November 2009
User registrations: 46,681
Course enrolments: 33,664
Resource Bank views: 247,911

Existing Portal (1.0)

Problems with Current Portal

Look-and-feel

Not very compelling

Usability

Challenging in places

A poor content management system

Can't really edit general content, so use a separate FTP server and Dreamweaver

Vendor lock-in

Even small changes, very expensive

The Future - Portal 2.0

Usability, Design and Content Review April 2008
Strategic Review August 2008
Feasibility Studies Jan 2009
Pilot Demonstrator (“Portal V1.5”) March 2009

Design Review

Architecture Review

Portal 1.0 - Monolithic, tightly coupled, poor separation of skin

Architecture Review

Portal 2.0 - Extensible, loosely coupled, good separation of skin

How Do We Get There? Remember: We Can't Touch the Existing System!

The Cunning Plan Skin 1.0 Portal 1.0 Existing Portal Module of functionality e.g. portfolio Browser

Total Skin Graft! Portal 1.5 New skin via xpath and xslt transformation. Web server needs to handle SSL. Together they give us nice URLs. web server transformation proxy Skin 2.0 Browser Skin 1.0

Deliverance

Several Different Projects

xdv
Deliverance 0.3

Nate just talked about Deliverence, so I won't go on about it

WSGI

WSGI allows you to write small modules chained together in a 'pipeline'
Many small filters combined together as you need
Lots of existing components out there
Very easy to write new ones

WSGI Power - The Pipeline [pipeline:portal] pipeline = theme.portal ploneinterceptor xslt linkrewrite htmlcleaner source.portal [filter:theme.portal] use = egg:dv.xdvserver#xdv theme_uri = file://%(here)s/theme/theme.html rules = %(here)s/rules/content.xml [filter:ploneinterceptor] use = egg:ns.ploneinterceptor#ploneinterceptor [filter:xslt] use = egg:dv.xdvserver#xslt xslt_file = %(here)s/rules/transform.xsl [filter:linkrewrite] use = egg:ns.linkrewrite#linkrewrite [filter:htmlcleaner] use = egg:ns.htmlcleaner#htmlcleaner [app:source.portal] use = egg:Paste#proxy address = http://www.theexistingsite.org.uk/

Link Rewriting

Old URL:

http://www.theclient.org.uk/WebPortal.aspx?page=1&module=DB920A53-01EA-4886-8878-F2CDF5FA8CFD&mode=101&IsNonNewsDB920A53_01EA_4886_8878_F2CDF5FA8CFD=True&newsIdDB920A53_01EA_4886_8878_F2CDF5FA8CFD=11208#10
205 characters!

New URL:

http://www.theclient.org.uk/news/11208#10
41 characters!

HTML Cleanup

LXML rules!

from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner cleaner = Cleaner(...) # Pretty print the HTML dom = document_fromstring(body) body = etree.tostring(dom, pretty_print=True) # Clean the HTML body = cleaner.clean_html(body)

Result