Microco.sm is a new platform for discussion forums, founded by David Kitchen and Matt Cottingham.
Communities are already using Microco.sm as their forum software of choice, e.g. the Espruino Forum and Islington Cycle Club.
Microweb is the official web client for Microco.sm, written in Django. If you're not familiar with the Microcosm API, you should start by reading the API documentation (it's up-to-date and readable, we promise).
If you find any problems, raise an issue on github and we'll respond ASAP.
To create a python virtualenv, run the following:
virtualenv -p python2.7 envname
source envname/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
This will install all dependencies listed in requirements.txt. All commands should be executed with the virtual environment activated.
Currently most of the project is contained within the microcosm app (due to be split in a refactor):
├── microcosm
│ ├── api
│ ├── forms
│ ├── __init__.py
│ ├── middleware
│ ├── static
│ ├── templates
│ ├── tests.py
│ ├── urls.py
│ ├── views.py
The api package contains classes for communicating with the Microcosm API. If you're familiar with Django, the rest of the packages and modules will look familiar.
Unit tests can be run with:
python manage.py test
Since authentication is handled by the API, custom middleware is used to provide the authentication context in views. In middleware/context.py:
def process_request(self, request):
"""
Checks for access_token cookie and appends it to the request object
if it exists. If the access token is invalid, flags it for deletion.
Populates request.whoami with the result of the whoami API call.
"""
request.access_token = None
request.delete_token = False
request.whoami = None
if request.COOKIES.has_key('access_token'):
request.access_token = request.COOKIES['access_token']
# if a bad access token is provided, flag for deletion
try:
request.whoami = WhoAmI.retrieve(request.access_token)
except APIException, e:
if e.status_code == 401:
request.delete_token = True
...So on each request we make a couple of calls to the API to check if the user has a valid access_token cookie, and retrieve some basic site data (title, description).