Learn.knightlab.com is a website created by students, for students, to help develop web making skills.
If you are going to work on developing the CMS, you need to have installed Python 3 and Postgres 9.x. Then you have to create a virtual environment and initialize the database.
See SETUP.md for details.
In most respects, the CMS is a standard Django application. The object model is meant to be light, because we are trying to leave a lot of flexibility for the content of lessons. We're using web components to support authoring rich lessons with sophisticated behavior while minimizing the specialist knowledge needed to write a lesson.
Authors do need to understand how to include other pieces of content by reference: the LessonView scans the markup in the Lesson.content field and, for
specific web components, interprets a ref attribute value as the slug for a companion model instance in the CMS with which to "fill-in" attributes of the component. This ensures content
consistency while leaving flexible how the components can be used.
Otherwise, there's a slightly hackish GeneralImage model which provides a way to upload images (or really, any media) so that it can be served to readers of the site. The idea is that once an image
is uploaded, its URL can be copied into the lesson content.
Over time, we hope to make the content authoring provide more tools to manage these relationships, but in our case, we're not interested in hiding the details from our authors, so it's not
the top priority. To be honest, there's more than a whiff of bad code smell around the GeneralImage but it's where we are now.
Work on the webcomponents is as simple as running a local webserver in the components directory. If you have the python
virtualenv installed as described in SETUP.md, then it can be as simple as this:
$ cd components && python -m http.server 8000
Otherwise, the components are meant to be self-documenting. The index.html file should be kept up to date if new components are added
or if guidelines need to be set.