Molo

Installation

Molo requires Python (version 2.6 or 2.7) to be installed. This installation method also requires pip. Both of these must be installed before following the installation steps below.

Installing Molo

Molo can be then installed using:

$ virtualenv ve
$ source ve/bin/activate
(ve)$ pip install molo.core

Getting Started

Molo scaffolds a Django application for you with sensible defaults, packages and configuration to help you get going as soon as possible.

Scaffold a site using Molo

The goal of Molo is to provide a solid base of proven, stable packages that help Praekelt Foundation and partners to deliver on project scope:

$ molo scaffold myapp
$ cd myapp/
$ ./manage.py migrate
$ ./manage.py createsuperuser
$ ./manage.py runserver

Open the sample site in your browser at http://localhost:8000/ and the CMS at http://localhost:8000/admin/.

Scaffolding a site in an existing repository

It's not always desirable to create a new directory for an application, especially when scaffolding an application for a repository that's already been created. Specifically for that Molo allows a second argument for the directory.

To scaffold an application called myapp in the current directory do:

$ molo scaffold myapp .

Specifying extra requires

Molo in itself is not expected to be enough to deliver on a client request. During scaffolding use the --require commandline parameter to include more libraries that are required for installation:

$ molo scaffold myapp --require=django-contrib-comments

Adds the django-contrib-comments to the generated requirements file which is read by the generated package's setup.py file.

Multiple requires can be specified on the command line:

$ molo scaffold myapp --require=django-contrib-comments

Automatically adding installed apps

If you're including a Django app chances are you're going to want to add it to your INSTALLED_APPS settings as well as adding an entry to the generated urls.py file:

$ molo scaffold myapp --include=django_comments ^comments/

This results in the following urls.py entry:

url(r'^comments/',
    include('django_comments.urls',
            namespace='django_comments',
            app_name='django_comments')),

Note

multiple includes can be specified on the command line, the format is --include=<app_name> <regex-for-urls>

For convenience, here's the full scaffold command for the current plugins:

$ molo scaffold myapp \
    --require=django-contrib-comments --include=django_comments ^comments/ \
    --require=molo.commenting --include=molo.commenting ^commenting/ \
    --require=molo.yourwords --include=molo.yourwords ^yourwords/

Molo, Django & settings files

What you have now is a standard Django application set up for normal development like outlined in the Django documentation. The only main difference is that your settings are Python modules found in the settings/dev.py and settings/production.py files in your applications folder. Both of these inherit settings from settings/base.py.

To create your own custom settings add a local.py file in the settings folder. The settings/dev.py will automatically include those settings for your local development environment.

Unpacking Templates from Packages

Sometimes a package's existing templates simply are not enough and need some amount of customization. Use the unpack-templates command in the scaffolded application to unpack a package's templates in your application's templates directory:

$ molo scaffold testapp
$ pip install -e testapp
...

You'll see the default templates that molo.core ships with available in the templates directory:

$ ls testapp/testapp/templates
404.html  500.html  base.html core

Now we unpack the profiles templates directory from the molo.profiles package into the testapp package template directory:

$ molo unpack-templates molo.profiles testapp
$ ls testapp/testapp/templates
404.html  500.html  base.html core profiles

The format is:

$ molo unpack-templates <source package> <target package>

Running tests

Now develop your application and write tests for the features you add. Running your tests for Django works as you would expect:

$ ./manage.py test

What is bundled with Molo?

1. Wagtail CMS
2. Basic feature phone template set.
3. Basic models for the following tree structure:
   1. A site has languages
   2. A language has a homepage
   3. Articles are organised into sections.
   4. Articles are composed from one or more blocks.
   5. Blocks can be headings, paragraphs, images, lists or links to other pages.
4. Molo Profiles: Provides code to help with User profiles in a project using the Molo code base.

Testing the Molo scaffolding tool

If you're interested in working on or contributing to the code that does the scaffolding then clone this repository from the GitHub repository at http://github.com/praekelt/molo.

Install the requirement development & testing dependencies:

$ pip install -r requirements-dev.txt

And then run the full test suite with:

$ py.test

Pull requests are expected to follow Praekelt's Ways Of Working.

Documentation

Documentation is available online at http://molo.readthedocs.org/ and in the docs directory of the repository.

To build the docs locally:

$ virtualenv ve
$ source ve/bin/activate
(ve)$ pip install -r requirements-docs.txt
(ve)$ cd docs
(ve)$ make html

You'll find the docs in docs/_build/index.html