Rails 3 and partials layouts - ruby-on-rails

Question

I'm trying to render a collection of different objects in a same format for each. I want to keep it DRY, so I want to use partials and partial layouts.
Edit - brief clarification : That I need is not to display common items on all publication pages, but to display common properties/fields on each item. This is why I need partial layouts e.g. a layout for the the partial, not a layout for the page.
I have a collection of different objects :
#publications = Publications.all
# Publication is the parent class
# #publications = [ImagePost, VideoPost, TextPost, ...]
I want to render all publications in a list. Each publication have some common properties : author, date, ... I want to put this properties in a partial layout.
So in my view, to render the collection, I do :
<%= render :partial => 'publications', :locals => {:publications => #publications} %>
In the first level partial views/publications/_publications.html.erb, I loop on the item and try to render each item in its partial and with a common partial layout :
<ul class='publications_list'>
<% publications.each do |p| %>
<%= render p, :layout => 'publications/publication_layout' %>
<% end %>
</ul>
The partial layout, views/publications/_publication_layout.html.erb :
<li>
<h2><%= link_to publication.title, publication %></h2>
... Other common properties that I want to display on each item, independently of its type ...
<p><%= yield %></p>
</li>
And finally for each object type, I have a partial (e.g. image_posts/_image_post.html.erb and so) containing the code to display properly each.
My problem : I don't manage to render each publication in the common partial layout publication_layout. This layout is simply ignored by rails. Each item is correctly rendered but without this layout which include the common properties and the <li> tag.
Any suggestion about why my partial layout is ignored ?

Answer 1

ANSWER AND WORKAROUNDS
Thanks to #MarkGuk to have spotted this line in the doc :
Also note that explicitly specifying :partial is required when passing
additional options such as :layout.
So it's just not possible to simply render a polymorphic collection within the same partial for each item.
Workaround 1 : I first tried to compute partial path for each item, store it in the model for convenience, and so render each item in the good partial with the good layout. But I realize that this method, I can't refer to the object publication inside the layout...
<ul class='publications_list'>
<% publications.each do |p| %>
<% # p.partial = p.class.to_s.underscore.pluralize +'/'+ p.class.to_s.underscore %>
<%= render :partial => p.partial, :object => p, :as => :publication, :layout => 'publications/publication_layout' %>
<% end %>
</ul>
Workaround 2 :
Finally I used nested partials.
<ul class='publications_list'>
<% publications.each do |p| %>
<%= render :partial => 'publications/publication_layout', :object => p, :as => :publication %>
<% end %>
</ul>
and replaced yield with a render publication inside the layout.

Answer 2

I wonder if a nested layout might serve you better here. The guide should point you in the right direction and I found it trivially easy to get working, but as a start:
In views/layouts/application.html.erb, change yield to:
<%= content_for?(:publication_content) ? yield(:publication_content) : yield %>
Eliminate the partial views/publications/_publication.html.erb and instead create the nested layout views/layouts/publication.html.erb:
<% content_for :content do %>
# Put common items here
<%= content_for?(:content) ? yield(:content) : yield %> # this is for specifics
<% end %>
<%= render :template => 'layouts/application' %>
Then specific layouts can be nested further or specified with additional tags in the view, depending on the rest of your setup.

Answer 3

See comments to the question and marked answer from the author.
Documentation
Answer from the author