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#Auteur ##Overview Auteur is a web app for organising your writing project. It allows you to break a project up into sections and then export the whole project as HTML or a PDF.

You can create templates which can then be used a a basis for projects. A template is really just a project that you mark as being usable as a template. This allows you to easily clone a project.

Projects can be deleted but not to worry, it is a logical delete so they simply disappear from the "Projects" list. If you take a look at the "Deleted Projects" list you can undelete the project. It may be thought of as an organisational tool.

Up to this point Auteur is a single user application but that may change in the future - Flask certainly supports it.

##Technology Choices A large part of the reason for writing Auteur was to try out an approach to writing a web application that is different to my day to day work. Additionally I wanted to learn more about using Python to write an application.

After some investigation and going through the Django tutorials I thought I'd try Flask (thanks Django!) Seriously, though Django is a great project with superb documentation but it was more than I thought I would need for this project. Also being a novice Python coder I found Flask was a little more obvious about some of the things it does along with very good documentation.

Anyway, the following excellent software is used / assembled here to create Auteur:

• Flask - a micro framework with lots of handy extensions
  • Flask-Alchemy - extension to make integration with SQLAlchemy simpler
  • Flask-Babel - integrate gettext with Flask
  • Flask-WTForms - handy form validation stuff
• SQLAlchemy - an ORM to insulates your application from the implementation details of your database
• SQLLite - a lightweight database, ideal while the application is still single user and while trying out development ideas due to the very low setup overhead
• Bootstrap - a nice simple layout framework for the front end. They provide some sensible options for the look and feel of your components as well
• jQuery - smooth out much of the annoyance of dealing with different browsers and the DOM in general
• CKEditor - any feature you could need from a editor embedded in a web page is here
• gettext - for multi-lingual support
• WTForms - deal with HTML forms in a consistent way throughout your app
• PyDev in Eclipse - makes things easy for the Python newcomer

##Running Auteur While it's by no means ready for production use it can be run and everything works fine.

Within my PyDev project I just right click on runserver.py and ask it to run. A new console should pop up showing it listening on 127.0.0.1. You can now go to 127.0.0.1:5000 in your browser and see a pretty empty page. If this gives your agrophobia a twinge you could always run the db_data_setup.py script beforehand (or afterwards) to populate the database with some example data.

This is probably a good point to apologise for the error messages. I'll make them more polite soon.

##Tests Feel free to run the tests.py unit tests in the top level directory as a pyunit test to see how that works. I used the Flask and PyUnit testing facilities to allow me to test the views as if they are being called from a browser.

The in memory form of the SQLLite database is used in the tests for speed and tidyness. Flipping back if there is a problem is very simple but isn't necessary to decide if your current change can be committed or not.