Compilation¶

Once you have written your rules file, you need to compile it to an XSLT for deployment. In some cases, you may have an application server that does this on the fly, e.g. if you are using the plone.app.theming package with Plone. For deployment to a web server like Apache or Nginx, however, you will need to perform this step manually.

The easiest way to invoke the Diazo compiler is via the diazocompiler command line script which is installed with the diazo egg. To see its help output, do:

$ bin/diazocompiler --help

To run the compiler with rules.xml:

$ bin/diazocompiler rules.xml

This will print the compiled XSLT file to the standard output. You can save it to a file instead using:

$ bin/diazocompiler -o theme.xsl -r rules.xml

The following command line options are available:

Use -t theme.html to supply a theme if none is specified in the rules.
Use -p to pretty-print the output for improved readability. There is a risk that this could alter rendering in the browser, though, as browsers are sensitive to some kinds of whitespace.
Use -a to set an absolute prefix - see below.
Use -i to set the default external file inclusion mode to one of document, ssi or esi.
Use -n to permit fetching resources over a network.
Use --trace to output trace logging during the compilation step. This can be helpful in debugging rules.

Check the output of the --help option for more details.

Absolute prefix¶

The compiler can be passed an "absolute prefix". This is a string that will be prefixed to any relative URL referenced an image, link or stylesheet in the theme HTML file, before the theme is passed to the compiler. This allows a theme to be written so that it can be opened and views standalone on the filesystem, even if at runtime its static resources are going to be served from some other location.

For example, say the theme is written with relative URLs for images and external resources, such as <img src="images/foo.jpg" />. When the compiled theme is applied to a live site, this is unlikely to work for any URL other than a sibling of the images folder.

Let's say the theme's static resources are served from a simple web server and made available under the directory /static. In this case, we can set an absolute prefix of /static. This will modify the <img /> tag in the compiled theme so that it becomes an absolute path that will work for any URL: <img src="/static/images/foo.jpg" />

Custom parameters¶

Custom parameters may be passed in at runtime to enable advanced if conditions for rules and theme selection. For this to work, however, the compiled theme needs to be aware of the possible parameters.

Use the -c / --custom-parameters option to diazocompiler and diazorun to list the parameter names that should be known to the theme. Multiple names should be separated by spaces. For example:

$ bin/diazocompiler -o theme.xsl -r rules.xml -c mode=test,preview

Here, the compiled theme will be aware of the parameters $mode and $test. The default for mode will be the string value test.

Using this theme.xsl, it is now possible to pass these parameters. See the section on Nginx deployment for more details about how to do this with Nginx, or the next section for how to test it with diazorun.

Testing the compiled theme¶

To test the compiled theme, you can apply it to a static file representing the content. The easiest way to do this is via the diazorun script:

$ bin/diazorun --xsl theme.xsl content.html

This will print the output to the standard output. You can save it to a file instead with:

$ bin/diazorun -o output.html --xsl theme.xsl content.html

For testing, you can also compile and run the theme in one go, by supplying the -r (rules) argument to diazorun:

$ bin/diazorun -o output.html -r rules.xml content.html

If you are using any custom parameters, you can specify string values for them on the command line:

$ bin/diazorun -o output.html -r rules.xml

-c mode=test,preview --parameters mode=live,preview=off content.html

To see the built-in help for this command, run:

$ bin/diazorun --help

Compiling the theme in Python code¶

You can run the Diazo compiler from Python code using the following helper function:

                        >>> from diazo.compiler import compile_theme

                      

Please see the docstring for this function for more details about the parameters it takes.

compile_theme() returns an XSLT document in lxml's ElementTree format. To set up a transform representing the theme and rules, you can do:

                        from lxml import etree
from diazo.compiler import compile_theme

absolute_prefix = "/static"

rules = "rules.xml"
theme = "theme.html"

compiled_theme = compile_theme(rules, theme,
                               absolute_prefix=absolute_prefix)

transform = etree.XSLT(compiled_theme)

You can now use this transformation:

                        content = etree.parse(some_content)
transformed = transform(content)

output = etree.tostring(transformed)

Please see the lxml documentation for more details.