Developer guide
All Developer guide
Access control
Access control is about defining who is allowed to access certain resources. It takes two steps:
Automatic startup on system boot
Once you have Zotonic running, you want to make sure that it automatically starts up when the server reboots, so that the website keeps running after a power…
Best Practices
Creating sites Media Best Practices Template Best Practices and Pitfalls
Browser/server interaction
There are multiple ways to set up interaction between server-side Zotonic code and client-side JavaScript.
Command-line shell
The Zotonic shell gives you access to a running Zotonic instance with its code and data.
Contributing to Zotonic
We encourage contributions to Zotonic from the community! This chapter describes how you can help improve Zotonic.
Controllers
Controllers are the Erlang modules which decide what happens when a browser requests a page. Zotonic looks at the dispatch rules that match the requested URL
Creating sites
Initialize your site with a proper data model and some resources through manage_schema .
CSS classes used in templates
If you are building a website then you might want to use the standard dialogs, overlays, authentication and other parts of Zotonic. To make those look like…
Deployment
So you have built your Zotonic site, and now you want to show it to the world. This page tells you how to configure your zotonic environment so that it is…
Developer Guide
The technical handbook for developers building websites with Zotonic. It guides you through all aspects of the framework.
Directory structure
Zotonic is a set of regular OTP applications. These can be found in the repository’s apps/ directory:
Dispatch rules
Dispatch rules route incoming requests to controllers.
Docker
We offer the Docker image zotonic/zotonic-dev which contains build tools and Erlang.
Download Zotonic
Get the latest release Download the latest release of Zotonic from Github. Use git clone, so that you can easily update later. Or clone our example project…
E-mail handling
Any Zotonic system is capable of sending and receiving e-mail messages over SMTP.
Forms and validation
You should validate all input data entered in forms. In Zotonic you create forms by writing plain HTML. You can attach one or more validators to each input…
Getting Started
You have three options for running Zotonic: to get started quickly, start our Zotonic container. You can also use Nix or manually install the dependencies.
HTTPS support
Zotonic has built-in support for HTTPS and TLS (previously SSL) certificate handling.
Icons
Including Zotonic icons CSS Add the CSS file to your template:
Introduction
This is the Zotonic Developer Guide. It takes you through all aspects of Zotonic so you can start building your own sites as quickly as possible.
Logging
Zotonic uses Logger for logging. Logger metadata is automatically set by Zotonic in the controller functions.
Media
Resources can have media resources attached to them. Resources and their media (images, video and audio) are connected through ‘depiction’ edges. Additionally
Media Best Practices
Use Media classes to define image properties.
Modules
Modules are the building blocks of Zotonic. They add functionality to your Zotonic website such as:
Notifications
At different moments in the lifecycle of the web request, Zotonic sends notifications. By observing these notifications you can override Zotonic’s behaviour.
Proxying Zotonic with nginx
It is possible to put Zotonic behind the nginx <http://nginx.org/> web server, for example if you have other, non-Zotonic virtual hosts running on your system.
Resources
Resources are Zotonic’s main data unit. You may want to familiarise yourself with the Zotonic data model in the User Guide.
Running on Port 80 and Port 443
Using standard ports helps visitors discover your page and removes the awkward port number from URLs.
Search
Using the query search API you can retrieve lists of resources in various ways. In your templates, you do so through the search model:
Server configuration
This chapter describes how to configure your Linux server for running Zotonic.
Sites
Zotonic has the capability of serving more than one site at a time. You can have multiple sites enabled, each with its own set of templates, database and…
Template Best Practices and Pitfalls
This chapter lists some preferred solutions to common tasks and pitfalls you may encounter while developing with templates.
Templates
Templates are text files marked up using the Zotonic template language. Zotonic interprets that mark-up to dynamically generate HTML pages. Zotonic’s template…
Testing sites
It is possible to create end-to-end integration tests for Zotonic websites. Tests like these are called sitetests . They run within the Zotonic shell
The Status site
The Zotonic “status” site is the first thing you see once you have installed Zotonic, or if you do not have any sites configured yet.
Translation
Many sites need to support content and templates in multiple languages. Luckily, Zotonic is completely multilingual, out of the box. mod_translation does all…
Troubleshooting
Installation Zotonic won’t start and shows errors when running zotonic debug Check your site’s database configuration.
Upgrade notes
These notes list the most important changes between Zotonic versions. Please read these notes carefully when upgrading to a new major Zotonic version.
Useful environment variables
The following environment variables influence how Zotonic starts up.
Using Varnish as frontend for Zotonic
Using the Varnish HTTP frontend, you can speed up your Zotonic even more as this web server caches static files intelligently.
Wires
Wires are the older way to code actions and client/server interaction. It is now advised to use MQTT topics with mod_mqtt instead.