Rophako

A simplistic content management system designed for kirsle.net.

Rophako is Azulian for "website." Pronounce it however you like. I pronounce it "roe-fa-koe."

This project is currently in "beta" status. It is currently powering kirsle.net and a couple other small sites.

Check out Rophako's official homepage and example site: rophako.kirsle.net

Installation

pip install -r requirements.txt

These may need to be installed for the dependencies to build:

Fedora: libffi-devel libjpeg-devel libpng-devel

Server Configuration

Instructions and tips are currently available for the Apache web server. See Apache.md for information.

Copy the file config-sample.py as a file named config.py, and edit its contents to set up your site. It's very important that you change the SECRET_KEY variable, as this is used to sign the session cookies and prevent people from tampering with them. The config script is well-documented with comments explaining what all the options do.

Plugins

The various site features in Rophako are delegated out into pluggable modules. Your config.py should call a load_plugin() method for each plugin you want your site to use.

The core plugins admin and accounts are always loaded automatically. The other built-in plugins like blog, photo, and comment are optional but are enabled by default in the sample config file.

Each of the built-in plugins are loaded as Flask blueprints, and the plugin specifies where it attaches its endpoint to within its own code, i.e. the blog plugin will attach to the /blog URI. For loading the built-in plugins in your site, just refer to them by name:

load_plugin("rophako.modules.blog")

Plugins are assumed to be Flask blueprint modules, which use the variable name mod to hold their Blueprint object. If your plugin isn't a blueprint, and you simply want it to be imported and run (i.e. perhaps it manipulates the app object directly to specify its endpoints), use the parameter as_blueprint=False. An example of this is with kirsle_legacy.py which defines legacy endpoints for kirsle.net for backwards compatible URIs:

load_plugin("kirsle_legacy", as_blueprint=False)

Finally, blueprint plugins can keep their own templates bundled within their module's folder. All of the built-in plugins do this -- it means that, for example, if you elect not to include the photo plugin, that the endpoints for its URIs (i.e. /photos/album) will give 404 responses.

You can specify the template path for your blueprint's templates as a template_path parameter to load_plugin(). By default, the module's name is converted into a path and a /templates folder is appended. So for example, the blog's template path becomes rophako/modules/blog/templates. This works fine for built-in modules (as your working directory will be the root of your Flask application), but hasn't been tested for third party modules.

Create the Admin User

Once the web app is up and running, navigate to the /account/setup URL to create the admin user account. Once the admin account has been created, the /account/setup path can't be used anymore. Additional user accounts can be created by the admin users at the /admin URL.

Building Your Site

Rophako has a dual templating system. When the Rophako CMS wants to render a template (for example, blog/entry.html), it will look inside your SITE_ROOT path first for that template, before falling back to the default site templates inside the rophako/www path.

All of the core features of Rophako (user account, blog, photo albums, comments, etc.) exist in the default site, so the CMS is already fully functional out-of-the-box. You can override files in the default site by putting files with the same name in your SITE_ROOT folder. For example, the default SITE_ROOT is set to the "site/www" folder in the git repo, and if you put a file at site/www/layout.html there, it will change the web design template for the Rophako site. A file at site/www/index.html will change the index page of your site away from the default.

Copyright

Rophako CMS
Copyright (C) 2014 Noah Petherbridge

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA  02111-1307  USA