1. Add a simple new web page¶

Evennia leverages Django which is a web development framework. Huge professional websites are made in Django and there is extensive documentation (and books) on it. You are encouraged to at least look at the Django basic tutorials. Here we will just give a brief introduction for how things hang together, to get you started.

We assume you have installed and set up Evennia to run. A webserver and website comes along with the default Evennia install out of the box. You can view the default website by pointing your web browser to http://localhost:4001. You will see a generic welcome page with some game statistics and a link to the Evennia web client.

In this tutorial, we will add a new page that you can visit at http://localhost:4001/story.

1.1. Create the view¶

A django “view” is a normal Python function that django calls to render the HTML page you will see in the web browser. Django can do all sorts of cool stuff to a page by using the view function — like adding dynamic content or making changes to a page on the fly — but, here, we will just have it spit back raw HTML.

Open mygame/web/website folder and create a new module file there named story.py. (You could also put it in its own folder if you wanted to be neat but, if you do, don’t forget to add an empty __init__.py file in the new folfder. Adding the __init__.py file tells Python that modules can be imported from the new folder. For this tutorial, here’s what the example contents of your new story.py module should look like:

# in mygame/web/website/story.py

from django.shortcuts import render

def storypage(request):
    return render(request, "story.html")

The above view takes advantage of a shortcut provided for use by Django: render. The render shortcut gives the template information from the request. For instance, it might provide the game name, and then renders it.

1.2. The HTML page¶

Next, we need to find the location where Evennia (and Django) looks for HTML files, which are referred to as templates in Django’s parlance. You can specify such locations in your settings (see the TEMPLATES variable in default_settings.py for more info) but, here we’ll use an existing one.

Navigate to mygame/web/templates/website/ and create a new file there called story.html. This is not an HTML tutorial, so this file’s content will be simple:

{% extends "base.html" %}
{% block content %}
<div class="row">
  <div class="col">
    <h1>A story about a tree</h1>
    <p>
        This is a story about a tree, a classic tale ...
    </p>
  </div>
</div>
{% endblock %}

As shown above, Django will allow us to extend our base styles easily because we’ve used the render shortcut. If you’d prefer to not take advantage of Evennia’s base styles, you might instead do something like this:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>A story about a tree</h1>
    <p>
    This is a story about a tree, a classic tale ...
  </body>
</html>

1.3. The URL¶

When you enter the address http://localhost:4001/story in your web browser, Django will parse the stub following the port — here, /story — to find out to which page you would like displayed. How does Django know what HTML file /story should link to? You inform Django about what address stub patterns correspond to what files in the file mygame/web/website/urls.py. Open it in your editor now.

Django looks for the variable urlpatterns in this file. You will want to add your new story pattern and corresponding path to urlpatterns list — which is then, in turn, merged with the default urlpatterns. Here’s how it could look:

"""
This reroutes from an URL to a python view-function/class.
The main web/urls.py includes these routes for all urls (the root of the url)
so it can reroute to all website pages.
"""
from django.urls import path

from web.website import story

from evennia.web.website.urls import urlpatterns as evennia_website_urlpatterns

# add patterns here
urlpatterns = [
    # path("url-pattern", imported_python_view),
    path(r"story", story.storypage, name="Story"),
]

# read by Django
urlpatterns = urlpatterns + evennia_website_urlpatterns

The above code imports our story.py Python view module from where we created it earlier — in mygame/web/website/ — and then add the corresponding path instance. The first argument to path is the pattern of the URL that we want to find ("story") as a regular expression, and then the view function from story.py that we want to call.

That should be it. Reload Evennia — evennia reload — and you should now be able to navigate your browser to the http://localhost:4001/story location and view your new story page as rendered by Python!

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1. Add a simple new web page¶

1.1. Create the view¶

1.2. The HTML page¶

1.3. The URL¶