A Lino for Alvatal¶
June 2–3, 2024
I am working on #5636 (A Lino for Alvatal). After a first brainstorming I assume they need a Lino Noi, but with content management (publisher, blogs albums) and without accounting (invoicing, service reports).
So I created #5637 (New options with_accounting and with_cms for Noi)
and added two new plugin settings
noi.with_accounting and noi.with_cms. When one of these
options is False, then a series of plugins is set to “hidden”:
noi.with_accounting:accounting,vat,trading, …noi.with_cms:sources,blogs,albums, …
I created a new demo project noi2 : Noi with publisher and without accounting.
Because the concept of hiding plugins is relatively new, this revealed a few places in the core where Lino did not yet manage well with hidden plugins. When a plugin is hidden, then it remains installed (especially for the database schema) but is not visible to the end users.
For example the lino_xl.lib.products.Product.vat_class field is hidden
in noi2 because the vat plugin is hidden. Hidden means that it is there
in the database, but not visible to end users.
products.Products.column_names has a field vat_class:
>>> products.Products.column_names
'id name category vat_class *'
>>> rt.show(products.Products)
==== ============= ================== ==========
ID Designation Designation (et) Category
---- ------------- ------------------ ----------
2 Extra Extra
3 Free Free
1 Regular Regular
==== ============= ================== ==========
After playing with this for some time (and fixing most but not all issues), I
decided or realized that it’s better to implement these two options by not
installing the related plugins rather than hiding them. Which also meant to
implement the two new settings as site settings, not as
plugin settings. An option that decides which plugins
are to get installed cannot be a plugin setting because it must be known when
the Site instantiates.
So Lino Noi has now two site settings (or “application options”)
with_accounting and
with_cms.
I am not sure whether it would have been possible to implement it by just hiding the relevant plugins. I didn’t dig further into that direction because I can’t imagine any advantage in being able to change these options without also having to migrate the database.
Some days ago I merged the pages plugin into the publisher plugin as a side
effect of #5633 (Special pages). Now I discovered a side effect of this
side effect: the publisher plugin now influences the application menu,
it causes a “Publisher” menu to appear, and in noi2
it appeared even before the “Contacts” menu. That was disturbing. I fixed this
by calling the super() method in Noi’s get_installed_plugins at the end, not at the beginning. I
reviewed the docs about How Lino builds the INSTALLED_APPS setting.
A side effect of #5637 (New options with_accounting and with_cms for Noi) is that Noi no longer has the publisher plugin installed when with_cms is False. Which makes sense, the publisher plugin in the “classical” Noi was rather accidentally there.