Two Flask apps, frontend and admin, on one domain using DispatcherMiddleware

9 October 2019 Updated 16 October 2019 by Peter

The Flask application I am writing to run this website has all code in a single 'app'. I already did some reorganizing as I wanted full separation of frontend code and the administration code. Now it it is time for total separation, meaning making the frontend a Flask app and the admin another Flask app while both running in the same domain and both reside in the same project directory. Because we ...
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Adding a contact form to a multilanguage page with content from a database

28 September 2019 Updated 11 October 2019 by Peter

Update 11 October 2019: I changed the addon-tag from '{% addon: ... %}' to '[[ addon: ... ]]'. The reason is that I wanted to be able to render the page text coming from the database, using render_template_string, and '{% ... %}' conflicts with Jinja2 tags. And yes, I do not want to implement a Jinja2 custom tag. What is difficult about implementing a contact page with a contact form with Flask ...
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Adding url_for() links to Jinja templates of a Flask multilanguage website

15 September 2019 Updated 15 September 2019 by Peter

Before you read on, you may want to read my previous posts about multilanguage and language fallback, see links below. When I gave myself the assignment to develop and implement a multilanguage Flask website with SQLAlchemy I knew things could get difficult. I did not really took the time to design everything beforehand, I just read a lot about multilanguage on the internet and trusted my experience ...
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Multilanguage fallback revisited and a page footer with multilanguage links

14 September 2019 Updated 14 September 2019 by Peter

Before you read on, you may want to read my previous post about language fallback, see link below. Here you have an example of the complexity of multilanguage. The link should be shown in the language you are using at the moment ... another time. Life is one long big sequence of problems we are solving all the time. It starts with getting enough oxygen, solved by breathing, maybe second ...
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Refining multilanguage: adding language fallback as an option

11 September 2019 Updated 10 January 2020 by Peter

In a previous post I described the first version of the multilanguage database used on this website. For every table that has fields that must translated, we add a 'translation' table with these fields. I also implemented language fallback: if an item, like a blog post, does not exist in the selected language then the item of the (system-wide) default language is shown. This works fine but now I want ...
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Making DeepL API machine translations a little bit better

31 August 2019 Updated 7 September 2019 by Peter

Update: Using reserved words is only working if you keep the words in place. I first substituted them for non-translatable tags but then DeepL does not know what it is doing anymore. Of course nothing compares to a translation by a professional translator. Machine translation is difficult. DeepL tries to improve translations by machine learning but they are still far away from using the proper ...
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Reducing page response times of a Flask SQLAlchemy website

29 August 2019 Updated 30 August 2019 by Peter

Objects, it is nice to build an application with them but it has one very big disadvantage: it can be very slow because of the extra CPU-cycles and all the extra memory used. The slowdown of course is very much caused by the extra mapper layers and extra data. Should you care about performance? Yes! The admin part of an application does not have to be very fast but the frontend pages, the pages ...
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Converting to a multilanguage database

25 August 2019 Updated 30 August 2019 by Peter

When I started this project, this website, I kept in mind that it had to support multiple languages. But of course I did not really look into database design because of all the other things I had to learn, add and implement. After a certain moment I could display and select multiple languages but that was for the texts in the code and templates and not for the database content items like blog posts ...
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Reorganize, restructure, move to content items, add themes, add more languages

14 August 2019 Updated 14 August 2019 by Peter

This post is about editing code, a lot of editing, huge amounts of editing! When you implement much functionality, you notice things that need attention, things that need you to research, how do others do this, what is the plural of certain words, etc. I maintain a todo list and every time I noticed something that needed attention I added it to this list. The list got too big so I decided to stop adding ...
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Building a multilanguage Flask website with Flask-Babel

7 August 2019 Updated 30 August 2019 by Peter

With a single language there is not really a problem, we just forget about the rest of the world and build our single language Flask application. We start getting a headache when the website must support multiple languages. What exactly is a website supporting multiple languages? How many languages will be supported, and which languages? For English there are for example en-GB and en-US. Which parts ...
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Welcome

This website is not finished. I started it because I wanted to learn Python, ORM and the framework Flask. And as I wanted to deploy it to my ISPConfig3 (Nginx + Mariadb) webserver I also had to dive into Docker. Read more