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As is fairly typical when I start a new project, I've been bogged down in minor details that have no relationship to the actual work I'm setting out to do.
In this case, these minor details have to do with configuring PyDS just right, setting up my CSS and blog links, etc. I have made a brief foray into Cheetah territory whilst customizing the look 'n' feel of this page. I am enjoying PyDS so far, but there are some things I can't figure out how to get it to do, to wit:
- I'd like to categorize my navigation links, and then have them displayed in different boxes (on the top left side). For instance, I have one navigation box linking to stories on the blog and one linking to template projects I'm interested in. I could easily add another box consisting of more general python projects which indirectly relate to the template / presentation-logic topic, but right now the second box, and all its links, are hand-coded in the navigationBox "nugget" (cheetah template). I'd rather have the links stored as data, and the navigation boxes generated programmatically from them.
<textarea>'s suck. It's not PyDS's fault that they do, but I'd love to use a tool like w.bloggar to compose and publish weblog or story posts. There is no obvious way to preview a post in PyDS besides going offline, publishing a post, previewing it, and going online again to upload it. Even then, the changes don't always appear instantly. Moreover, PyDS doesn't have a built-in spellchecker.
- I was considering using ReST as the source for all of my content, but I can't figure out how to get it to render a
title="spam" attribute into an <a> tag. I also can't figure out how to get the PyDS renderer to add class="first" on the first <p> tag of every post. And I'm not sure what, if any, of the classes in the big old CSS file are used when ReST is rendered into HTML. (None of this is necessarily PyDS's fault, though.)
- I'm still a bit confused by the category system. I don't see an obvious way (yet) to display a menu of categories for the user to browse, nor a way to display what categories a given post belongs to. In addition, stories don't seem to be associated with categories at all. And this weblog posting, not being in the "homepage" category, may not appear in the site navigation at all.
All that being said, I actually like PyDS quite a bit. It is still lacking in polish, but it feels like it's headed in the right direction, and although its documentation feels a bit disorganized, the program itself is easy to play around with.
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