Multiple Layouts in One Ruby on Rails Site - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have a website that is already up and running. I would like to add a new page on my Ruby on rails Website and would like to make the page look completely different.
Different Layout, Different Theme, Everything.
I have created a new scaffold for these pages. but am unsure how to achieve the desired results.

Answer 1

You can create the assets for your theme to make the page look completely different. Rails uses the default app layout at app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
However, you can create another layout with your theme and render the view using:
render layout: "<your-layout-name>"

Answer 2

For different ways to render different layouts, you can also refer to this railscast
Yes, you can do this by passing some params from controller action and checking in application.html.erb
Suppose you have users_controller and home as controller action as your root path
Then in users controller
def home
params.store(:diff_page, true)
end
In application.html.erb
In your application content is the id for main div inside body then
#content{:class => (params[:diff_page] ? "back-black" : "back-gradient")}
back-black and back-gradient both are css classes which you can define different style and page, background image anything you want
You can also call different partial too, based on params
- if params[:diff_page]
= render :partial => 'users/new_page'
- else
= render :partial => "layouts/page"

Answer 3

We do this on one of the sites i help manage: we have two completely different domains, each of which with its own totally unique look and feel, running off the same rails app. The second domain is called "cmw" within our project structure, and is set up as follows.
routes
You can put a condition on routes which looks at the request domain, and only runs that route if the domain matches the condition. So, we put all the cmw routes at the top of the routes file, all with the same condition. Then, underneath, the regular site routes. When we get a request to "cmwdomain.com", it will trigger one of the cmw routes. Requests to "maindomain.com" will fall through all the cmw routes, because they have the condition, which fails for this domain, and hit one of the routes below which are for the main site.
eg
#################### START OF CMW ROUTES: ALL HAVE A CONDITION ON THEM TO DIFFERENTIATE THEM FROM REGULAR ROUTES ###############
cmw = { :host => CMW_HOST_REGEX }
map.resources :licenses, :controller => "cmw/licenses", :conditions => cmw
map.resources :users, :controller => "cmw/users", :conditions => cmw
#REGULAR ROUTES
map.resources :licenses, :controller => "licenses"
map.resources :users, :controller => "users"
controllers
The above system sends all of the cmw requests through to controllers in the app/controllers/cmw folder. Normally, all controllers would extend ApplicationController. In our case, we have a CmwController which extends ApplicationController, and is kind of like the CMW-specific version of ApplicationController. This has its own default layout and various protected methods and helpers which are specific to the cmw site. Then, all the cmw controllers extend CmwController instead of ApplicationController.
views
To match the views to controllers, we have a folder app/views/cmw where all of the different cmw controllers' corresponding view folders live.
This system is nice and clean. The second "cmw" site has its own routes, controllers and views, but accesses the same models and database as the main site: two faces of the same app.