I hate to explicitly use html/css to build pages. Is there a template language I can use to semantically and quickly describe the layout and content of the page so that later I can generate html and css from it?
I'm planning to use this on a django site (but I guess if such solution already exists for RoR I can always adapt it).
Thanks.
There's GRHML, which is HAML for Genshi. (Django adapter)
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I work on apps that often have thousands of partials and finding what partial is rendering a section of HTML can be tedious and just waste time.
In development mode, it would sometimes be very helpful to turn on a config to have every partial used be prefaced with its path in an HTML comment so I could quickly know how to access and edit it.
Is there a config option for this or a gem that someone has made for this?
This functionality is built-in to recent rails versions for erb templates.
See here for details: https://blog.saeloun.com/2020/05/11/rails-support-annotates-html-output-with-template-file-names.html
That page mentions another option you could try.
Here is a link to the rails pr that introduced the change: https://github.com/rails/rails/pull/38848
I'm working on an email newsletter using ActionMailer that's associated to our Rails 3.0.7 application. So against all my instincts, I'm using inline styles like mad since that seems to be the only way to do things in html email. I'd also like to keep the color scheme consistent with the website in a DRY fashion.
Is there any way to share SASS color variables between a Rails application and its SCSS files for use in inline styling?
The only way I'm aware you can do this is to add .erb onto your sass files so that they're processed by Rails, then you can use application level constants:
<%= APP_CONFIG[:yourkey] %>
Similar question / more reading
Coding emails is such a heinous task that I try to turn off all the higher thinking regions of my brain that worry about good programming principles every time I have to do it. Unless email is the central part of this project I'd resist letting the constraints there affect the rest of your application design.
Best solution I've found so far is the premailer gem: https://github.com/alexdunae/premailer/
Post-processing your HTML with premailer inlines all the CSS defined in a separate stylesheet, letting you specify whatever you want in a SASS or CSS file.
I need to take a database text field and parse it for
duplication and garbage
malice
whitelisted selectors
compress and output as a css file
Since there might be a rails way I'm unaware or something ready made I'm asking before I waste time trying to reinvent a wheel. My searching revealed nothing, mostly in rails seems aimed at view level, and css seems to be an unattended niche in this area (plenty of html though).
I'm aware of the sanitize gem (doesn't do css immediately, yet another thing I'd need to map out and code) and the built in rails stuff (not a lot of tutorial, aimed mostly at the view level). I need a gem, lib, module or something similar that I can work with in a controller or queue.
EDIT:
Without getting too deep into the specifics of the project: administrative users can add css for their portions of the site. As part of the flow I'm going to save the raw css and then process and save the processed css. The db stuff is archival mostly, the css file is output immediately. Because there is few places to add modified css and only admins have access to the css, it sort of works but I'm looking to make it more robust in the future where admins who may not be as conversant with the security needs or not as css aware can operate.
The most basic example is that it just a text field on an admin page. The admin cuts and pastes css there, submits, and the application turns it into a css file that gets included with the designated pages, which works because the current admins know the application, the css of the application, and what they can and cannot change. The goal is to make this more robust for future admins who might not be as savvy.
To simply sanitize CSS, you can use the SanitizeHelper built into Rails: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/SanitizeHelper.html#method-i-sanitize_css
Have you looked at Sass? It has all of the parsing logic built in, for a superset of CSS. You could add a feature (Sass support) and save yourself the need to parse/validate the CSS all in one go.
You can generate output CSS from Sass (or just plain CSS, since Sass [with the SCSS syntax] is a fully-backward-compatible superset of CSS) like this:
output_css = Sass::Engine.new(sass_content, :syntax => :scss).render
There are a bunch of options that you'll probably want to look into at http://sass-lang.com/
Another option is Less. The new Twitter Bootstrap framework uses Less, and Rails 3.1 uses Sass. The biggest difference is that the official Less parser/compiler is built in JavaScript, so you could actually validate and compile in the user's browser while they work and show them any errors before they save. Of course then you need to run a JavaScript engine (e.g. V8) in your Rails application if you want to use Less to validate the incoming CSS still.
I'm working with a large project where the templates are written in erb. We're getting more and more into client side rendering of parts of the project and we have lots of exact duplicates in mustache of our erb templates.
I'd like to change the erb templates that are replicated in mustache to mustache and print the js templates out from those templates.
I haven't been able to figure out how to mix templating languages in rails though, is this possible? I'd rather not rewrite all the erb templates in mustache.
Thanks!
Maybe Isotope could be useful for you? I never tried it though.
I fear you'd have no direct solution...
An alternative:
You could reuse your good old html created by ruby if you insert in handlebars templates. But it's another js library...
http://www.handlebarsjs.com/
Currently for my Rails 3 mailer templates, I need to create an html and text version in the views/user_mailer directory.
Why is that necessary? Why can't rails look at the html version and automatically format it to a text/plain version?
This is not required. You can simply provide one of those templates. For instance, if you don't need HTML, you can create the TEXT file only.
Likewise, you can provide the HTML template only. Readers will attempts to extract the information.
However, if you use HTML, you should provide an alternative TEXT version to make sure the readers won't mess the content of your email.
By the way, Rails doesn't force you to provide both templates.
This question seems to be similar to yours and might be helpful to you:
Graceful degradation/progressive enhancement for Action Mailer templates?
Also, here are some direct links to some gems that help to solve this problem of duplication between html and text mailer templates:
https://github.com/plataformatec/markerb
https://github.com/Mange/roadie
https://github.com/fphilipe/premailer-rails3