Author: Mike Orr

Installation

For best results use Pylons >= 0.9.5 with Cheetah >= 2.0rc8. Neither of these are released as of March 2007, but you can install the development versions in the meantime:

$ easy_install Pylons==dev
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cheetahtemplate.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cheetahtemplate login
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cheetahtemplate.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/cheetahtemplate co -P Cheetah
$ easy_install ./Cheetah

Advantages of Pylons 0.9.5:

• "paster make-config" no longer depends on obsolete Cheetah 1.0.

Advantages of Cheetah 2.0rc8:

• Better Unicode handling.

You'll also need the TurboCheetah package ("easy_install TurboCheetah"). Change the last line in turbocheetah/cheetahsupport.py ('return str(tempobj)') to:

if fragment:
    return tempobj.fragment()
else:
    return tempobj.respond()

This not only works better with Unicode, it gives some support for "fragments" (see below).

Application configuration

In your application's middleware file (myapp/config/middleware.py) after the config.init_app() call, add this line:

config.add_template_engine("cheetah", "myapp.templates", {})

Your controller methods will then look like this:

def hello(self):
    c.what = "Cheetah world"
    return render_response("cheetah", "index")

The template for this controller method would be myapp/templates/index.tmpl, containing "Hello, ${c.what}!"

Important: Your templates directory and any subdirectories must contain an __init__.py file, or TurboCheetah will not find the templates.

To avoid the "cheetah" argument in render_response, make Cheetah the default template. Do this by adding "config.template_engines = []" before the add_template_engine line in middleware.py. The first engine added is the default. Then your controller method can say 'return render_response("index")'.

Fragments

If you pass 'fragment=True' to render_response, the template is supposed to be rendered without any site decorations (i.e., inherited templates). Cheetah doesn't have this concept, but if you define a '#def fragment' method in your template, TurboCheetah will call that and use it as the fragment.