... because even your apps will sometimes need a change of clothes.
I'd like to make it as easy as possible to:
- start up a new theme
- "fork" an existing theme to implement your own changes
- not require adding routes
- rely on the asset pipeline
- rely on gem packaging toolchain
- rely on rails' plugin system
In your gemfile:
gem 'wardrobe'
And after a bundle install you can generate a new theme. Let's assume we're calling it bulldog.
rails g wardrobe:theme bulldog
Note on naming -- use underscore naming as the convention. EG: english_bulldog, not english-bulldog.
This will great the skeleton of an asset gem in ./themes/bulldog and will let you know what to add in your gemfile. You must add the resulting code to your own Gemfile as it won't do it for you. For the purposes of our above example it would be:
gem 'bulldog', path: './themes/bulldog'
Initial asset manifests and directories:
vendor/assets/stylesheets/bulldog.css.scss
vendor/assets/javascripts/bulldog.js
vendor/views/layouts/bulldog.html.erb
vendor/views/shared/
You may now reference these assets in your layout(s) or view(s) with the following:
<%= stylesheet_link_tag "bulldog" %>
<%= javascript_include_tag "bulldog" %>
This is the most straightforward, Rails supported out-of-the-box, approach. The new assets are in the asset pipeline path(s) and are set to pre-compile.
By default, rails will search your view path for layouts named after your current controller, falling back on (the default) application.html.erb. With a wardrobe theme you will get a new layout named after your theme. To switch to your new layout, if you so choose, point your root ApplicationController to your theme's layout
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
layout "bulldog"
#...
end
Your app will look for each controllers' corresponding view as usual. Please note that your theme's view path has been appended to the back of the list of searched paths and any view templates found in previous paths will take precedence. As a result, ensure your application's view templates are moved to the theme directory structure.
- Generators
- http://guides.rubyonrails.org/generators.html#creating-generators-with-generators
- http://railscasts.com/episodes/218-making-generators-in-rails-3?view=asciicast
- http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Generators/Base.html
- http://nicksda.apotomo.de/2010/09/getting-a-bloody-rails-3-generator-running-and-testing-it/
- Asset organization and pipeline setup