From jeff.barczewski at gmail.com Wed Jun 21 16:08:28 2006 From: jeff.barczewski at gmail.com (Jeff Barczewski) Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:08:28 -0500 Subject: [Masterview-announce] [ANN] MasterView rails-optimized (x)html friendly template engine plugin - Release 0.2.0 Message-ID: <19cda190606211308k27ea6b6ah2d0f3a709261e242@mail.gmail.com> MasterView rails-optimized (x)HTML friendly template engine plugin - Release 0.2.0 The MasterView development team is pleased to announce the general availability of MasterView release 0.2.0. MasterView is a rails-optimized (x)html friendly template engine plugin that provides another option to the existing rails view templates (rhtml and rxml). The main idea is to provide a template engine that would provide all the power of layouts, partials, and rails helpers but still be editable/styleable in a WYSIWYG editor. It was also a major goal that the syntax of these attribute directives be very similar to rails helpers so that one could intuitively start using MasterView with little learning curve other than knowing rails. MasterView was inspired by Amrita, Kwartz, Tapestry, Zope/PHP TAL, Liquid, and Web Objects but designed with a fresh approach and specifically targetted for rails users. Allow your web designers to work on the design while the developers focus on coding. To get you up and running quickly the MasterView generator creates usable styleable templates (along with controller and models) that can be easily customized to your needs. Or start straight from your html prototype and add MasterView attribute directives directly to those files. You can re-edit those same template files at any time in your development life cycle to update html layout and style. This project was launched in January of 2006. Building on the suggestions of early users, the MasterView project has been enhanced for better team usage and for easier configuration/upgrading. The original release generated a single master file for all actions, but this has been changed to generate separate files for each action and each template simply imports the other supporting layouts and partials needed to provide full WYSIWYG design capabilities in each file. A synchronizing (rebuilding) mechanism has been created to automatically be able to sync up the imports so that designers are always working with a consistent view. The single file generation mechanism is still available as an option. MasterView directives were designed to be user extended so that additional directives could be loaded and shared amongst the community, providing infinitely extendable options. Custom directives could be designed to wrap complex layout and view code into a very simple declaration in your view. For instance directives could be created that ajaxify tables so that they support sorting, ajax updates, and gracefully degradation without javascript. Directives might simply be used internally to simplify repetitive view code. Video A quick start video which demos the basic operation is available at http://masterview.org/videos/masterview_quick_start.html MasterView is released under MIT open source licensing. Main site: http://masterview.org/ Rubyforge Project site: http://rubyforge.org/projects/masterview Goals - Create/extend a template engine for rails that would be XHTML friendly and thus could be edited/styled with a WYSIWYG HTML editor even late in development without breaking template. - Keep it simple. DRY. No extra config files, simple syntax with ruby flavor. - Design it specifically for ruby and rails. Use the full power and not be limited in its capabilities over what can be done with ERb (rhtml) - Work nicely with layouts, partials, and rails html helpers. - Reduce complexity, work with existing rails code, no extra view logic or hashes than what is used by ERb (rhtml). Scaffold generate initial templates or work from existing html prototype. Make scaffolds nicely styled and easily useable for production with minor changes. - Reduce the numbers of files, simplifying editing. Define partials and layouts naturallyl right in the template, no need to go to another file. - Preview in browser without running an app. Allow for dummy data in the template so that the page can be viewed and styled independently of the application. - Performance equal to ERb (rhtml) Release Notes - Ability to easily utilize multiple template files for a controller making it easier to work together as a team on files and to keep file sizes manageable. - Added capability for eliminating rhthml generation, extends rails so that rhtml can be pulled directly from MasterView (rhtml file generation now optional) - Rails like configuration system which provides a clean way to configure options - MasterView admin pages for working with templates and viewing generated rhtml - Rake utilities to provide command line capabilities equal to those in MasterView admin pages. - Configuration and documentation cleanup. - Keyword expansions for generate and import directives. - Support for configuring MasterView logger and log_level Installation - several options (gem install or plugin install) - As a gem - gem install masterview_gem_pack; cd railsapp; script/generate masterview_plugin - As a pure plugin using plugin install - script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/masterview/tags/masterview - As a pure plugin download from rubyforge - download masterview-x.x.x.tgz or .zip and extract to railsapp/vendor/plugins/masterview Visit the online documentation page at http://masterview.org/ for complete installation and usage information. We would love to hear your feedback and ideas around this project! Visit the rubyforge project to join the users mailing list or to add yourself to the announce list to receive future announcements. Check out the videoto see MasterView in action! Thanks for your time!! MasterView Development Team Jeff Barczewski and Deb Lewis -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/masterview-announce/attachments/20060621/6e073638/attachment.html From jeff.barczewski at gmail.com Wed Jun 28 14:28:17 2006 From: jeff.barczewski at gmail.com (Jeff Barczewski) Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2006 13:28:17 -0500 Subject: [Masterview-announce] [ANN] MasterView Release 0.2.1 Message-ID: <19cda190606281128k23e56b6yb45aa64662ae506b@mail.gmail.com> Release 0.2.1 adds Mongrel support, a new image_tag directive and some additional illustrations and links to videos. Also javascript_include and stylesheet_link directives can infer the path from the src attribute if the attr_value is empty. More information is available in the directive documentation. Also added additional logging around startup and the version of MasterView that is running and a new admin page to visually see what MasterView features are currently loaded (tidy,auto parsing on change, parse on startup, reading rhtml direct from masterview (eliminating rhtml file generation)) Release 0.2.1 is available via gem, rubyforge download, or svn If using SVN then the recommended tag to pull is svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/masterview/tags/masterview which will always point to the latest release. Release 0.2.0 was a big release with much new functionality and refactoring. As a result of the cleanup, configuration changed, default template src path was changed from app/masterview to app/views and one directive was renamed for clarity. Details below. This release also received a major upgrade in the consolidation of IO which allows for much flexibility in where and how templates and files are read and written. Because of this upgrade it was easy for us to extend Rails to load the rhtml (erb) directly from MasterView without serializing to the file system (although can be configured optionally to do so). UPGRADE NOTES: If you have customized your MasterView configuration in the init.rb file of your existing plugin installation, you *MUST* migrate your configuration to the new settings file configuration mechanism (config/masterview/settings.rb and environment settings files). Also note that a directive was renamed from gen_render to gen_partial to more clearly represent the functionality and eliminate future confusion. Be sure to change any references to gen_render to gen_partial. The default location for MasterView templates is now the standard Rails app/views directory rather than app/masterview. Either move your existing templates into app/views or update the MasterView config.template_src_dir_path setting in your config/masterview/settings.rb to reference your existing templates source directory. If you have any questions or problems with the new release, let us know. Thanks, Jeff From jeff.barczewski at gmail.com Fri Jun 30 12:37:19 2006 From: jeff.barczewski at gmail.com (Jeff Barczewski) Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 11:37:19 -0500 Subject: [Masterview-announce] MasterView release 0.2.2 - maintenance release, fixes rhtml error, documentation updated Message-ID: <19cda190606300937y75b3d4dcqa7b0c85a38c73d43@mail.gmail.com> MasterView 0.2.2 - maintenance release Fixes problem when rails encounters exception in either compiling or involving RuntimeError in the generated rhtml. The rails TemplateError class looks at the file system for the template contents. So when generate_rhtml is false (no file is generated) rails was not able to find source and was not outputting an error page. Rails TemplateError class was extended to look at MasterView store first and then fallback to file system. Documentation was updated with some more details around generator and including screenshots and an illustration. Jeff -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://rubyforge.org/pipermail/masterview-announce/attachments/20060630/7398d765/attachment.html