Lipstick on a Pig Dynamically
re-skinning a legacy .NET portal with python Matt Hamilton matth@netsight.co.uk 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 1

Introduction  Dynamically re-skinning a
.NET portal site  Can't name the client  Portal for teachers in the UK  Aggregating content across legacy portal, Plone and Moodle 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 2

Who Am I  Technical
Director of Netsight → Web development firm in Bristol, UK  10 years experience with Zope/Plone  More of an integrator than core developer → I get involved in all those sticky projects of merging Plone in with other systems in an enterprise 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 3

Where Were We? 30th June
2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 4

Existing Portal (1.0)  Five
years old by November 2009  User registrations: 46,681  Course enrolments: 33,664  Resource Bank views: 247,911 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 5

Existing Portal (1.0) 30th June
2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 6

Problems with Current Portal 
Look-and-feel → Not very compelling  Usability → Challenging in places  A poor content management system → Can't really edit general content, so use a separate FTP server and Dreamweaver  Vendor lock-in → Even small changes, very expensive 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 7

The Future - Portal 2.0
 Usability, Design and Content Review April 2008  Strategic Review August 2008  Feasibility Studies Jan 2009  Pilot Demonstrator (“Portal V1.5”) March 2009 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 8

Design Review 30th June 2009
Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 9

Architecture Review  Portal 1.0
- Monolithic, tightly coupled, poor separation of skin 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 10

Architecture Review  Portal 2.0
- Extensible, loosely coupled, good separation of skin 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 11

How Do We Get There?
Remember: We Can't Touch the Existing System! 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 12

The Cunning Plan Browser Portal
1.0 Existing Skin 1.0 Portal Module of functionality e.g. portfolio 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 13

Total Skin Graft! Browser web
server New skin via Skin 2.0 xpath and xslt Portal 1.5 transformation proxy transformation. Web server needs to handle SSL. Skin 1.0 Together they give us nice URLs. 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 14

Deliverance  Several Different Projects
→ xdv → Deliverance 0.3 To learn more on specifics of Deliverance go to http://deliverance.openplans.org 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 15

WSGI  WSGI allows you
to write small modules chained together in a 'pipeline'  Many small filters combined together as you need  Lots of existing components out there  Very easy to write new ones 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 16

WSGI Power - The Pipeline
[pipeline:portal] [filter:theme.portal] pipeline = use = egg:dv.xdvserver#xdv theme.portal theme_uri = file://%(here)s/theme/theme.html rules = %(here)s/rules/content.xml ploneinterceptor xslt [filter:ploneinterceptor] linkrewrite use = egg:ns.ploneinterceptor#ploneinterceptor htmlcleaner source.portal [filter:xslt] use = egg:dv.xdvserver#xslt xslt_file = %(here)s/rules/transform.xsl [filter:linkrewrite] use = egg:ns.linkrewrite#linkrewrite [filter:htmlcleaner] use = egg:ns.htmlcleaner#htmlcleaner [app:source.portal] use = egg:Paste#proxy address = http://www.theexistingsite.org.uk/ 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 17

Link Rewriting  Old URL:
→ http://www.theclient.org.uk/WebPortal.aspx? page=1&module=DB920A53-01EA-4886-8878- F2CDF5FA8CFD&mode=101&IsNonNewsDB920A53_01EA _4886_8878_F2CDF5FA8CFD=True&newsIdDB920A53_ 01EA_4886_8878_F2CDF5FA8CFD=11208#10 → 205 characters!  New URL: → http://www.theclient.org.uk/news/11208#10 → 41 characters! 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 18

HTML Cleanup  LXML rules!
→ from lxml.html.clean import Cleaner cleaner = Cleaner(...) # Pretty print the HTML dom = document_fromstring(body) body = etree.tostring(dom, pretty_print=True) # Clean the HTML body = cleaner.clean_html(body) 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 19

Result  Old → 70kb
of HTML → 120 Validation errors, 61 warnings  New → 40Kb of HTML → 27 Errors, 1 warning (mainly xhtml/html conflicts) → No significant performance impact 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 20

Putting all together Composite:main pipeline:portal
pipeline:plone pipeline:moodle theme.content theme.content theme.content xslt navmerger navmerger linkrewrite plonecontent moodlecontent htmlcleaner source.plone source.moodle source.portal 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 21

End Result New Style 30th
June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK Portal content 22

Complications  Navigation → One
page, two content sources, how is the navigation built?  Search → Search needs to go across multiple systems → Will soon be looking at Solr, Xapian, Google Mini  .NET viewstate postback → Massive hidden state variable, form wraps entire site! 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 23

Questions? matth@netsight.co.uk 30th June 2009
Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 24

We are looking for Developers!
Come chat to me or drop an email to careers@netsight.co.uk 30th June 2009 Europython 2009, Birmingham, UK 25