pycms

A minimalist component based web content management system built upon CherryPy.

About

pycms is a minimalist component based web content management system built upon CherryPy.

Features:

All the goodies of Plone/Zope: Python instead of a PHP security mess, no MySQL can of worms, clean separation of code and content, runs nicely behind a web server / cache / load balancer.
Plain text storage of all site contents and settings in JSON files.
Effortless theming. Design an HTML page in your favourite editor, put in some $placeholder_variables, and upload. pycms cares for the rest.
Small memory footprint. We're talking about 13 MB physical memory.

pycms is aiming at frustrated Plone users (and is being developed by one). Plone is an excellent CMS, but it has several severe shortcomings:

Plone/Zope is extremly difficult to manage, especially to update, when relying on unstable third-party plugins. Yes, one should not use them, yet we all do, since those extensions often add vital functionality.
Plone/Zope puts all contents into an object database. Accessing and changing the raw data, bypassing the CMS, is only possible via cumbersome command-line work. And we're not talking at all about manually fixing broken plugins in the database.
Theming Plone is a mess. To reproduce a preconceived design in Plone, long-winded CSS hacks along with a combination of interface settings and template customisations are required.
Plone/Zope has a comparatively large memory footprint. This can be an issue on slim virtual servers.

Plone is still a great system. Its security track record, internationalisation, and workflow tools are awesome. If you have a big site with complex requirements, go for it.

Prerequisites

Python > 3.0 http://www.python.org

CherryPy http://cherrypy.org/

Installation

There is no installation necessary. Simply run

python3 -m pycms.run

from the pycms folder.

Command Line Options

Usage: pycms.py [options]

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p PORT, --port=PORT  The port to listen on. Default: 8000
  -t THREADS, --threads=THREADS
                        The number of worker threads to start. Default: 10
  -a, --autoreload      Turn on CherryPy's auto reloading feature.

Templates

pycms templates are plain and valid HTML files, for the ease of editing.

<body> and <link> tags must be the first tags on a single line in the HTML file.

pycms recognises special elements wrapped in HTML comments like this:

<!-- begin TYPE -->
... HTML, possibly with $variables ...
<!-- end TYPE -->

Where TYPE is one of

node
wrappednode
linklist
blognode

'wrappednode' supports the $content placeholder variable.

Hard-Wired Rendering

BlogNode

<h2>
<a style="text-decoration:none;" href="URI">TITLE</a>
</h2>
<p style="font-size:80%">CREATOR, DATE</p>
<p style="font-style:italic;">ABSTRACT</p>
<div>CONTENT</div>

Wrap BlogNodes in a div to control their rendering via CSS.

Linklist

<div class="linklist">
<ul>
<li><a href="URI">TITLE</a></li>
...
</ul>
</div>

General Page Footer

<p id="footer" style="font-size:8pt;text-align:center;">
Powered by <a href="http://florian-berger.de/en/software/pycms">pycms</a>
</p>

Documentation

To read the API documentation, open a shell / DOS window, navigate to the pycms directory, and run

pydoc pycms

You can create a HTML version using

pydoc -w pycms