BlastOff 0.2 released

BlastOff 0.2 has now been released.  BlastOff is a quickstart template for Pylons. It is a substitute for the simple boilerplate template that Pylons provides out-of-the-box.  Use BlastOff to generate a Pylons skeleton configured with SQLAlchemy, mako, repoze.who, ToscaWidgets, TurboMail, WebFlash and (optionally) SchemaBot. The generated app is pre-configured with authentication, login and registration forms, and (optionally) email confirmation.

The great thing about Pylons is that it provides a basic web framework stack that assumes very little about what you want to do.  The default application template contains no authentication, for example.  It is up to the user to choose an authentication middleware that best fits their needs.  Unfortunately, for newbies, it may not be obvious which middleware to choose.  Pre-configured templates like BlastOff can help users get started with the author's recommended choices of middleware components and configuration.  BlastOff contains my own choice of best-of-breed components that I use in my own Pylons applications.

Not every template will be best for every developer, so I encourage others to create Pylons template packages.  A few others already exist, I found out recently, so I created a Pylons Project Templates page in the Pylons wiki to list them.  Take a look if you want to see how others are configuring their Pylons apps or just want to accelerate your Pylons development.

Cheers,
Chris Miles

Image by lecates @ flickr / CC BY-NC 2.0