Theming Chiselman

Sun, 10 Sep 2006 By Pradeep Gowda

I wanted to make some cosmetic changes to the the layout and colors of this blog, after some complained about 'white-on-black' text.

So, I went about adding "theme" feature to chiselman instead of overwriting the templates.

This is how I did it, by overriding pylons' default render_reponse 

def render_response(*args,**kargs):
    tmp = args
    theme = read_theme_name() #from global conf file
    if theme:
        path  = '/%s%s' %(theme,args[0])
        args = [path]
        args = args + list(tmp[1:])
    return pylons.Response(render(*args, **kargs))

And added one more entry themes to the paths[templates] in config/environments.py 

       paths = {'root_path': root_path,
                'controllers': os.path.join(root_path, 'controllers'),
                'templates': [os.path.join(root_path, path) for path in 
                              ('components', 'themes', 'templates')],
                'static_files': os.path.join(root_path, 'public')
                }

Created a folder called themes in the same level as 'templates'. All the files belonging to a theme go under a folder below 'templates' folder.

Set the theme name in your .ini file under [app:main] directive. (I'm hard coding that value currently, because I have only one theme right now ;)

Next steps: 1. Akismet - too many spam comments

  1. Captchas - contact form has become a spam attractor :(

  2. Admin interface - I will be able to release the code once I get this done.

§