A KalaPy project is a collection of several packages. A package represents either a web application (e.g. a wiki or a blog) or an addon package. The resources provided by an addon package will be served as resources of the original package. This way, you can build a highly modular web applications quickly.
For example, the included example project provides two packages. The wiki package provides a simple wiki application and the wiki_extended package provides extended features.
See how the original wiki application looks like:
Now suppose, you want to change the behaviour, look and feel or even want to provide new functionality to the wiki application, generally you have to edit the wiki application. But what if for some reason, you don’t wont to modify the original application? Then generally, you should have to implement some kind of addons system for your application.
KalaPy has built-in addons functionality, which let you create an addon package similar to normal application package. In order to create an addon package, you just have to specific the name of the package to be extended in the package settings:
EXTENDS = "wiki"
The included wiki_extended package extends the wiki application without touching it. See how the wiki application looks like after activating wiki_extended package:
You can see that the layout and look and feel is changed. Also note the search feature has been implemented.
The resources including static contents, templates, models and view functions of the wiki_extended package will be served as resources of the original wiki package.