I'm looking for a more attractive alternative to the standard scaffold.css?
Has anyone come across a stylesheet that was specifically designed as a more attractive, less sparse alternative to the built-in scaffold.css?
I'm going to assume the others are answering the wrong question with their focus on scaffold generation and guess that you really just want more attractive css.
I'd suggest blueprint css framework which has fairly attractive defaults. It's not specificly designed to replace scaffold.css but it doesn't take much to make it work.
You honestly don't need one. Why? Because you're not supposed to be using that. A scaffold is precisely what it is, something there to help you while you're building your app, but not a system for the long term.
However, if you just want something that doesn't look like the graduate class at Playskool My First Web App produced, try Ryan Bate's (Railscasts Guy) Nifty Generator gem at http://github.com/ryanb/nifty-generators/tree/master. Not only does it look slightly better, but it has some nifty extras built into it.
Related
There are several WYSIWYG editors out there, such as TinyMCE, CKEditor, etc. However, IMHO these editors don't have a nice and modern appearance like Froala. Problem is that Froala costs, and it sucks because this is just an internal app that I plan on using long-term without anyone else even looking at it.
TinyMCE and CKEditor also seem to have some pretty terrible themes. I'm ultimately wanting to get something inside of my ruby on rails application.
Does anyone know of any modern looking WYSIWYG editors that actually look like they were developed in the last 10 years? I have a beautiful theme for my rails app and I just don't want to kill it with some old looking theme.
Not looking to get flamed and yes I've googled, but I came here because I really can't find what I'm looking for and hoping someone else can shed some light.
I really don't see a whole lot of difference between Freola and TinyMCE, or the HTML editor this website uses.
Can you list specific features you're looking for that the items in the list don't do? I know you mentioned theming, but there are literally hundreds of themes for TinyMCE and you can roll your own without much effort at all.
The best WYSIWYG I've come across is Redactor. It costs $500 for a developer license:
There is a gem called redactor-rails which provides it for free (I don't know how).
It is the most efficient & good-looking I've come across.
If you want functionality with the likes of Paperclip etc, we've used CKEditor extensively. Yes, it looks crappy but I believe there are ways to style it:
I can give you the code we use if you want to try it. Once you get rid of 99% of the non-essential elements, it starts to look good.
I was looking for information comparing Ember.js and Backbone.js for use with a Ruby on Rails backend. Does anyone have experience working with both of these client side frameworks and would be willing provide some insight around them?
Both are great, and you can't make a bad choice imho.
There is a good thread on this subject on Quora, with an answer from one on the Ember.js author, Yehuda Katz: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences-between-Ember-js-formerly-SproutCore-2-0-and-Backbone-js
A quote from the thread (Austin Bales)
A lot of the differences between the two come down to this: SC2/Ember have made a few decisions in advance about the tools and workflows you'll use. Backbone has very few opinions on matters of templating, rendering, hierarchy, and KVO/Binding – in Backbone there's almost always "More Than One Way To Do It" and almost never a predefined way. In contrast, Ember provides a little more infrastructure and default options out of the box.
The fact that Ember.js is opinionated is probably a good thing in the long run I'd say. It's kind of the same philosophy as rails where they often make choices for you.
I actually have to make this choice at work as well. I tried working a little bit with both, and I have to say, I feel more confortable with Backbone, but it's really not a well informed opinion ;)
ps: check this out: http://addyosmani.github.com/todomvc/
It's a todo app implemented with all the popular frameworks. It could help you compare the two.
edit: Since I wrote this answer, I've been trying to learn Ember, and I'm really liking it. Here is an AWESOME blog about ember, everything is very well explained, clear, in depth: http://darthdeus.github.com/.
Ideally, you would master both, as I feel that they have different use cases now.
Gordon Hempton has written a nice article about JS frameworks here: http://codebrief.com/2012/01/the-top-10-javascript-mvc-frameworks-reviewed/
which features you would like to have in Ruby on Rails, or maybe which features you find incomplete or bugy?
It's honestly a pretty full-featured framework. After using it professionally for two years, I have never come across anything Rails couldn't handle. In fact, quite the contrary, I'm constantly finding more and more amazing features I wasn't previously aware of.
Plus with the concepts of gems and plugins, the sky is the limit.
The more you use it, the more you'll love it.
Some things are easier done in pure SQL than ActiveRecord, and some are just impossible without SQL. This breaks the abstraction somewhat.
Since the creation of Engines, modularity & reusability made a huge leap which is great.
I'm wondering whether we'll need another abstraction layer for rich js interfaces. To be a more constructive, I'd personally appreciate to organize my js file the same way I organize my helpers.
#RocketR remark is totally right, as well as tybro0103 conclusion :)
Just got a new website project for my company internal use. The whole website isn't that complicating but requires quite a lot of real time interaction. Basically, it's an interactive time line table where we can freely drag and drop each elements to move and resize them.
At first I wanted to use this opportunity to learn Python+Django (I'm given a huge amount of time) but then I read around and a lot of people mentioned Rails is better for creating rich interactive website.
So, for a website with a lot of drag & drop interaction like this, is Rails really the better choice? Is Rails built-in ajax that much easier to work with compare to Django+jQuery? How flexible and customizable is Rails' built-in ajax? I want to learn RoR just as much as Python by thee way.
I don't think AJAX functionality will define which framework you find yourself preferring.
I can't answer most of your question relating to ajax, but still think this post could be useful for you: it's highlighting a huge difference between ROR and django -- mainly RoR uses magic, django doesn't.
I prefer django for exactly that. Others may prefer RoR for the same reason I don't.
What's wrong with "magic"?
Rails' developers are of the opinion
that this sort of "magic" is a good
thing because it makes it easier to
quickly get something working, and
doesn't bore you with lots of details
unless you want to reach in and start
overriding things.
Django's developers are of the opinion
that this sort of "magic" is a bad
thing because doesn't really save all
that much time (a few import
statements isn't a big deal in the
grand scheme of things), and has the
effect of hiding what's really going
on, making it harder to work out how
to override stuff, or harder to debug
if something goes wrong.
Both of these are, of course, valid
stances to take, and generally it
seems that people just naturally
gravitate to one or the other; those
who like the "magic" congregate around
Rails or frameworks which try to
emulate it, those who don't congregate
around Django or frameworks which try
to emulate it (and, in a broader
sense, these stances are somewhat
stereotypical of Ruby and Python
developers; Ruby developers tend to
like doing things one way, Python
developers tend to like doing things
another way).
So I think one will click for you regardless of out of the box ajax support.
Speaking as someone who mostly works on Rails, I would say take a day with each framework, follow a "getting started" screencast or tutorial, or pick up a book. ( For rails, I recommend Beginning Rails 3 ). Then, keep going with whichever one you feel more comfortable with.
One amazing resource rails has is Railscasts. Railscasts almost single-handedly converted me from PHP to ROR. I don't know if Django has a similar volume of quality screencasts available or not.
All frameworks are pretty heavily focused on the server-side of the equation. Now, Rails has a lot of things that help make writing views (your drag and drop stuff) nice, such as HAML (a fantastic template language)... and while I don't know enough to post links I'm sure Django has similar helpers. It's worth noting that both Django and Rails can use jQuery or any other javascript framework.
But, in the end, just by the nature of the web as stateless, there's going to be a degree of independence between your client-side templates and javascript, and what's serving that from the server side.
The real question you should probably be focused on is: Do you want to become a jQuery ninja, or do you want to scale up a notch and focus on Javascript itself, perhaps using tool suites like MooTools or Prototype. Your drag and drop stuff is client-side, so that's where your toughest decisions will have to be made.
Good luck!
I used to worry about things like this and would try new frameworks all the time because people would say it was a big improvement over the last one I was using until I realised I wasn't doing anything. Now I just pick one and stick with it. The fact that I know it much better than any others means I am more productive, even though the other frameworks probably include nice little tricks and shortcuts, and because I know it better I can debug problems faster.
Basically what I am trying to say is that just about every popular web framework can do everything that you want it to. Some are better than others but what really matters is that you become an expert in at least one of them. Being able to dabble in lots is not helpful, you really need to know one inside and out. Committing some code to the project helps this process.
Mainly depends on which programming language you prefer to work and most comfortable with. Some prefer the flexible syntax of Ruby others like the cleanliness of Python. Also need to take into consideration the production environment (aka what OS is it going to be hosted on).
Django does not do interactive web applications, it is agnostic to the whole "frontend" part, this is done in Javascript with little to no support from Django (except for transferring data from AJAX calls).
So if you want to use Django for this, you will have not only to learn Python but also to learn loads of Javascript.
I like this solution as hand-written Javascript feels a lot clearer than any of these generating tools to me, plus there are plenty of libraries that make writing advanced Javascript GUIs a breeze these days, check out Jquery UI or ExtJS.
From there, the server side will only be AJAX calls that (de)serialize data in JSON, nothing else.
Both Rails and Django are good. Try them both out and see which you like better.
I've been reading up about HAML/SASS lately and I'm not quite sure why any one would not want to use it. It seems to be very easy to switch, makes things cleaner and more efficient.
Update:
What about using one or the other? Most of the complaints (the few complaints there are) I hear seem to be about HAML, would there be any problems mixing and matching XHTML/HAML and CSS/SASS?
Update:
Sorry, one final update to the question. It seems to me that switching back from SASS to CSS is painless and simple. What about switching back from HAML to HTML?
If you're using Rails, yes. Go for it. Some issues you will hit, though, will be that any other developer brought onto the team later will have to learn it, as well. If you're already working with a big Rails crowd, that's fine, but HAML/SASS may confuse a designer who's worked with pure HTML/CSS for years.
If you're not using Rails, though, a good HAML/SASS integrated system is hard to come by. There are a few out there, but I imagine they're not as well-supported or as far along with the spec.
But, yeah. HAML/SASS is definitely worth it. The only real issue you'll hit is that it's not yet standard.
As for mix-n-match, HAML and SASS are so similar in style that I'd say go for both, but it, again, comes down to personal preference. Try using both for a day, and if you don't like one of them, switch back. There's no technological issue about it, so do what you prefer.
There are lots of tools for working with HTML and CSS. The syntax isn't pretty, but the improvements from HAML and SASS don't seem that dramatic to me, and for many they're not worth the trouble. Of course, for those developing web application with widely differing frameworks (differing from Rails that is) it's even harder to find a reason to go to the pain of integrating something so foreign. (Example: care to explain what I'd have to do to integrate SASS into my Java/Stripes/JSP environment? :-)
I've been on volunteer projects where HAML's syntax curve (syntactical whitespace, the automatic generation of tags etc) has been seen as a barrier: one more thing for a programmer new to the project to learn.
Personally, I think SASS is worth it, but I'm up in the air about HAML: having debugged HAML templates before it seems like the typing you don't have to do with HAML is overcome by the time you spend debugging why there's an error on your templates. This could be a (HAML) newbie's perspective though.
I'm inclined to agree with the question; it is easy to switch, the syntax isn't that complicated, and it does make things cleaner and more efficient. It also makes it harder to unwittingly generate invalid HTML.
I also think the learning curve is shallow enough that a programmer that can't handle it, is probably a programmer you are better off without on your team. That might sound harsh, but I believe it.
The only cons I can see would be if you are developing in ASP.NET or something where retrofitting Haml and Sass would be a pain, is way unexpected for anyone else used to the platform, and possible a chore to maintain in a production environment. On Rails though, go for it.
I don't think that using HAML ever adds much benefit to a project.
SASS, on the other hand, effectively introduces variables and computations and other really useful features that save you time and effort in the long run on larger projects.
Using SASS is incredibly smart with any project that's larger than just a simple one-page form.
I tried using SASS but found that editing CSS using MacRabitt's CSSEdit (Mac Only) was way easier and more efficient for the way I work. I'm a very visual person and like to have a live preview when making changes to style sheets and didn't feel like investing a ton of time into something I wasn't having a problem with.
One thing most people don't realize is that HAML sucks for content. It's great for structural markup, but don't try and push it too far. (You can mix & match HTML in your HAML file, too!)
Sass is absolutely indispensable, especially in the long run. It's not just about writing the stylesheets when you have it all in your head, but about maintaining them down the road. The new Sass3 takes the syntax question out of the equation: you can take your pick if you prefer the curly-bracey SCSS syntax.
HAML/SASS may indeed be awesome to use, but they do introduce dependencies both technical and knowledge-oriented. This may not be an issue if your dev and prod environments are controlled and predictable enough, with newbies receiving enough training (or being vetted for subject knowledge on the way into the organization) to hit the ground running, but all of that is overhead to be acknowledged.
why is this..
%p
hello world
better than this..?
<p>hello world</p>
clue.. If you aren't doing ruby, it isn't. Unfortunately adding closing tags and braces isn't really the most challenging aspect of making webpages, so most professionals wouldn't really care. Use whichever you prefer.
From a developer's perspective, Haml and Sass absolutely rock. However: from a designer's perspective, Haml and Sass might not be readable. It really depends on who is on your team.
If it's a bunch of developers and/or designers who aren't afraid to learn a DSL, then absolutely go for it.
If you have a mixed team where designers toss their CSS and HTML work to developers who translate that to Haml/Sass, sure.
If you have a design team that passes work to the developers AND the work flows back to the designers, you may not want to use this because the designers might not be able to use their tools to edit the files.
If you have a small team where marketing and business people need to edit the web pages and they only know HTML and a light bit of CSS, then you probably shouldn't use Haml/Sass.
However you can't really make a blanket statement here. Consider that at least with Rails you can mix the template types in your views. So, some of your templates can be plain HTML stuck in .erb files, and other pages are .haml files. You can have partials be of one type inserted into templates of another. (I think mixing types is probably a bad practice, but if you just need to "get the job done" then it's an option.)
I am using SASS on a Django project right now. I like it and am going to continue using it. One problem I've found however is that error messages aren't always particularly intuitive, particularly if you leave off a }.