AYM CMS Readme

The AYM CMS is a simple static CMS system built on top of Django templates, and a 76 line Python build script.

You can use all the default Django template filters and tags, and AYM CMS has a couple of custom tags to facilitate handling static content more intelligently.

Prerequisites

AYM makes use of a handful of Python libraries:

1. Django
2. Python-Markdown
3. PIL
4. Pygments

All of those libraries should be an easy_install away:

sudo easy_install django
sudo easy_install markdown
sudo easy_install PIL
sudo easy_install Pygments

Installation

If you have the folder containing this README file, then AYM CMS is already installed.

Usage

Unzip/download the AYM CMS project folder. Then type

python build.py

to build the current website to the deploy/ directory.

Adding Pages to your CMS

Adding a page to your cms is a two step affair:

1. Create a template within the templates/ directory. You can take advantage of template inheritance and all the normal Django templates goodies to do so.

2. Add the template's name to PAGES_TO_RENDER in your settings.py file.

You may create templates in subfolders of templates/, but be sure that the template string you give to PAGES_TO_RENDER reflects that.

For example, you might create the charts subfolder in templates/, so that its path is templates/charts/. If you create a template named line_chart.html, then you would update PAGES_TO_RENDER to look like this:

PAGES_TO_RENDER = (
    'index.html',
    'charts/line_chart.html',
)

AKA, it works exactly the same way that Django does.

Using YUI Compressor with AYM CMS

In the settings file, set YUI_COMPRESSOR to be a path to a YUI Compressor jar on your computer. Afterwards, all CSS and JS in your statc/ directory will automatically be compressed.

You must download YUI Compressor yourself. It is not bundled with AYM CMS.

Using CleverCSS with AYM CMS

You can use CleverCSS with AYM CMS as well. Simply install CleverCSS

sudo easy_install CleverCSS

And set these settings in settings.py:

USE_CLEVER_CSS = True
CLEVER_CSS_EXT = ".ccss"

By default it treats .ccss files as CleverCSS, but you could change it to treat all .css files as CleverCSS if you desire.

.ccss files will be renamed to .css by the build script, and will be compressed with YUI Compressor if you have it enabled.

Using HSS with AYM CMS

You can now use .hss files, as specified by the HSS project page, to create your site's CSS files.

You must download HSS yourself. It is not bundled with AYM CMS.

Simply put the .hss file into your static/ directory, and AYM CMS will translate them into .css files in your deploy/static/ folder when you run the deploy script.

Note that means in your HTML you'll need to import my_hss.hss as my_hss.css, because the file extension will be translated by the build script!

(If you are using YUI Compressor, then AYM CMS will first convert .hss files to .css, and will then compress them. AKA: it'll just work how it should.)

Adding Static Content to your CMS

All content within the static/ directory will be copied over into the deploy/static/ directory when you run the build script.

The script will preserve subfolders as well, so simply arrange things to your liking in the static/ folder and you'll be good to go.

Adding Images to Project

Add any images you want to the images/ folder, and AYM CMS will automatically create thumbnails and copy them into a subfolder of the deploy/static folder when you run the build script.

You can access these images within your templates in two ways. First, the images template context is a list of your images which can can use as follows:

{% for image in images %}
<a href="{{ image.image }}">
    <img src="{{ image.thumbnail }}" alt="{{ image.filename }}">
</a>
{% endfor %}

Second, you may refer to images by name via the images_dict context variable. If you added the crazy_cats.png image to your images/ directory, you could then refer to it like this:

<img src="{{ images_dict.crazy_cats.image }}">

And thats really all there is to it.

AYM Template Tags

At this time there are two custom template tags included in the AYM CMS project: markdown and syntax.

markdown renders the enclosed text as Markdown markup. It is used as follows:

{% load aym %}
<p> I love templates. </p>
{% markdown %}
Render this **content all in Markdown**.

>> Writing in Markdown is quicker than
>> writing in HTML.

1.  Or at least that is my opinion.
2.  What about you?
{% endmarkdown %}

syntax uses Pygments to render the enclosed text with a code syntax highlighter. Usage is:

{% load aym %}
<p> blah blah blah </p>
{% syntax objc %}
[obj addObject:[NSNumber numberWithInt:53]];
return [obj autorelease];
{% endsyntax %}

They are both intended to make writing static content quicker and less painful.