Tutorial

This tutorial is trying to give a quick introduction in how to create your first website with SilverFlask.

Creating a simple page type

First, we will create a basic page type for our website. Therefore we need to subclass silverflask.models.SiteTree:

from silverflask.models import SiteTree

class SimplePage(SiteTree):
    db = {
        "content": "UnicodeText"
    }

Now you should point your browser to localhost:5000/admin/dev/build to automatically generate the necessary database entries for you.

When you open admin and check the “Add Pages” menu, you will see our SimplePage as one of the available page types. You can even start editing the page, save and publish it and it should render just fine in the default template. Note that all of this functionality comes from the SiteTree

This is because we chose the name content for our db field, which is also the standard name for the main content which is used in the default template.

We can also create a little script to create a new instance of this page:

from silverflask import db

sp = SimplePage()
sp.name = "What a beautiful title"
sp.content = "Interesting Content"
db.session.add(sp)
db.session.commit(sp)

This example also shows how the variables defined in db are added to the class namespace and are accessible through their names.

All column types from sqlalchemy are available, such as

• Integer
• Text
• String (text, but with a maximum length)
• Boolean
• Date, and DateTime
• ... (check sqla_types. for more)

Extending the page further

Suppose we want to add a cute little header image to the page, we can do that easily by adding a has_one relation to the SimplePage. The relation will point to the silverflask.models.ImageObject.

from silverflask.models import SiteTree

class SimplePage(SiteTree):
    db = {
        "content": "UnicodeText"
    }
    has_one = {
        "header_image": "ImageObject"
    }

The necessary database columns for this relation are automatically added to the model.

Now you might wonder how to access this image – it’s easy. Relations are added to the object in the same way as the database columns. So using

s.image

Will return you the image object that is related to the SimplePage. There are actually several interesting functions defined on the silverflask.models.ImageObject which you can utilize e.g. in the template.