Having finished mocking up a few pages, I’m now concentrating on writing a very lightweight CGI script to test the various python engines. Amusingly, I’m finding myself wishing for a template system as I do it - what I have now is a very simple one based on open(fname).read() % data. I am strenuously resisting writing up my own template engine to run the comparison.
I’m doing this in CGI because my cheap (but good) web hosting provider won’t let me run long-running processes such as Quixote, Twisted, etc, and frankly I’ve already got enough poorly-organized documentation to read with the template engines; adding web framework documentation to the pile would probably drive me utterly insane.
In entirely unrelated news, my small patch for the Python syntax highlighter in GeSHi will be included in their next release.
Once I do a little more hacking, I’ll go back to working on the sample pages page and then start documenting the back end. One problem I’ve run into is that I won’t quite know what the back end needs to contain until I start templatizing the sample pages, but maybe it will be better to write the presentation objects before the I get into those nitty-gritty details.