Alex Clark: New Pyramid Site

Pyramid

I spent a lot of time (~ 1 year) developing pythonpackages.com in Pyramid, but the result was a mess (code-wise). I'm in the process of rewriting and open sourcing it, but it's slow going. So what better way to get started than to do a small-ish site in Pyramid for fun?

about.me

I also recently gave in and created an about.me site. I was impressed by their content editing features, and my ability to create a page that looked OK using them.

In my about.me profile, I used a picture of me and a picture of DC I took in early 2012. When it came time to redo aclark.net I felt like I really wanted to capture the simplicity of the about.me site, so I used the same photo in the background.

Bootstrap

Bootstrap is old news at this point, but I really enjoy using it and I particularly like that they have added more example templates. So I combined my background photo with one of their example templates and a new site idea was born. As I'm not a particularly talented visual artist, my ability to produce something that looked OK (with code this time) was exciting.

Contact form

But then I wanted a contact form. Which lead me to wanting an elegant way to send mail via Heroku. Which lead me to discover SendGrid. Which lead me create some primitive marketing features I am quite proud of and excited about.

I still ended up sending mail "the old way" via GMail. But now I send two mails: one to info@aclark.net to alert our staff about the lead (using GMail). And one to the lead acknowledging their submission (using SendGrid). SendGrid keeps a record of all the leads we've contacted, amongst other "fancy marketing features". Here's the relevant view code:

import deform
import smtplib

from email.mime.text import MIMEText

from .config import FORM_ERROR
from .config import FORM_SUCCESS

from .config import MIME_ONE_RECIPIENT
from .config import MIME_ONE_SUBJECT
from .config import MIME_TWO_MESSAGE
from .config import MIME_TWO_SUBJECT

from .config import GMAIL_HOSTNAME
from .config import GMAIL_PASSWORD
from .config import GMAIL_USERNAME

from .config import SENDGRID_HOSTNAME
from .config import SENDGRID_PASSWORD
from .config import SENDGRID_USERNAME

from .forms import ContactFormSchema


def contact(request):
    """
    Create and render deform form containing colander schema. Provide
    sendgrid integration for marketing.
    """
    button = deform.Button('Send', css_class='span9 btn-block btn-large')
    schema = ContactFormSchema().bind(request=request)
    form = deform.Form(schema, buttons=(button, ))
    if 'Send' in request.POST:
        items = request.POST.items()
        try:
            appstruct = form.validate(items)
        except deform.ValidationFailure:
            return {
                'form': form.render(),
                'request': request,
            }
        # This is the form contents
        email = appstruct['email']
        message = appstruct['message']

        # This is the mail to info@aclark.net
        mime_document_one = MIMEText(message)
        mime_document_one['Subject'] = MIME_ONE_SUBJECT
        mime_document_one['To'] = MIME_ONE_RECIPIENT
        mime_document_one['From'] = email
        mime_document_one = mime_document_one.as_string()

        # This is the mail to the new lead
        mime_document_two = MIMEText(MIME_TWO_MESSAGE)
        mime_document_two['Subject'] = MIME_TWO_SUBJECT
        mime_document_two['To'] = email
        mime_document_two['From'] = MIME_ONE_RECIPIENT
        mime_document_two = mime_document_two.as_string()

        try:
            # This is the mail to info@aclark.net
            smtp_server = smtplib.SMTP(GMAIL_HOSTNAME)
            smtp_server.starttls()
            smtp_server.login(GMAIL_USERNAME, GMAIL_PASSWORD)
            smtp_server.sendmail(email, MIME_ONE_RECIPIENT, mime_document_one)
            smtp_server.quit()

            # This is the mail to the new lead
            smtp_server = smtplib.SMTP(SENDGRID_HOSTNAME)
            smtp_server.starttls()
            smtp_server.login(SENDGRID_USERNAME, SENDGRID_PASSWORD)
            smtp_server.sendmail(MIME_ONE_RECIPIENT, email, mime_document_two)
            smtp_server.quit()
            request.session.flash(FORM_SUCCESS)
        except:
            request.session.flash(FORM_ERROR, 'errors')
        return {
            'form': form.render(appstruct={}),
            'request': request,
        }
    return {
        'form': form.render(),
        'request': request,
    }


def default(request):
    """
    This is the default view, to be used with most routes since we do not
    provide any content editing ability yet. Even then, maybe a default view
    would still be helpful.
    """
    return {}