A talk I gave at the European Plone Symposium 2009 in Sorrento So you have a big legacy portal application which you want to change the look of, but are contractually not allowed to touch? Here is a case study on how we used the power and flexibility of python and wsgi and the wonder of lxml to dynamically re-skin a proprietary .NET portal without even touching it. We take a giant lump of messy invalid HTML markup and dynamically strip it back, add semantic markup and CSS and present the user with a nice svelte valid site.

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

3. Can't name the client

4. Portal for teachers in the UK

5. Aggregating content across legacy portal, Plone and Moodle

8. Where Were We?

10. User registrations: 46,681

11. Course enrolments: 33,664

12. Resource Bank views: 247,911

13. Existing Portal (1.0)

16. Strategic Review August 2008

17. Feasibility Studies Jan 2009

18. Pilot Demonstrator (“Portal V1.5”) March 2009

19. Design Review

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

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

24. 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

26. Deliverance 0.3 Nate just talked about Deliverence, so I won't go on about it

28. Many small filters combined together as you need

29. Lots of existing components out there

30. Very easy to write new ones

31. 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/

34. 41 characters!

38. 27 Errors, 1 warning (mainly xhtml/html conflicts)

39. No significant performance impact

40. Putting all together

41. End Result New Style Portal content

44. Questions? [email_address]