Now for something completely different...

For a change of pace, here's a picture riddle for you:

The first one to post with the right answer gets -- Well, nothing actually. Respect maybe? Uh, sure, why not.

Rails Theme Support Plugin

Update: I changed the svn URL to point to it's new home!

Currently, to add support for themes into your rails application, you have to install the theme_generator. The generator will then create the folder structure for themes, and it also creates the plugin files for theme support in rails.

The more I've thought about it, the less I like this approach. I'd rather have a fully encapsulated plugin that would add support for themes into rails and define a simple generator that would merely create the boilerplate theme structure.

To that end, I present the Rail Theme Support plugin. To install the plugin execute the following in the root of your application (requires rails 0.14.3+):

./script/plugin install http://mattmccray.com/svn/rails/plugins/theme_support

In the next couple of days I'll have a trac installation up and running for it too.

You can, of course, still get the theme_generator from RubyForge. But I think the plugin will be the approach I will recommend moving forward.

Try it out and let me know what you think!

Theme Generator Shapes Up

I've released theme_generator version 1.3.0. It's shaping up rather nicely, if I say so myself.

The theme support is now completely encapsulated in a plugin -- it was split across a plugin and a component.

Like Typo, it fully supports custom application views, of course. (It is based on the Typo theme system, after all.)

It also supports using liquid templates (if you have the liquid plugin installed). You can also lock down the themes to only allow the rendering of liquid templates.

And it's dead simple to use. Once you have the theme_generator installed, here are the steps to make your application support themes...

Step One: Generate a theme named 'default'

In your command terminal, cd into your Rails (0.14.3+) application folder and execute:

./script/generate theme default

It spits out the folder structure for a theme named 'default' (it doesn't actually have to be called 'default', call it what you like).

Since it's the first time we've used it for this application, it'll also create the theme_support plugin files for us.

Step Two: Update your ApplicationController

Now we update the ApplicationController (application.rb) to tell Rails to use our new theme.

classApplicationController< ActionController::Base
  layout 'default'# You may need to modify this, the generator will
# create a layout named 'default' by, uh, default
  theme 'default'# Tell Rails to use the theme named default
end

Step Three: There is no step three

Your app is now ready to support themes! You can create whatever theme-specific stylesheets, images, javascripts, layouts, and application views you'd like and Rails will pick them up.

Note: To reference theme-specific content you'll want to use the theme_* helper tags. See the docs for more.

Credit where credit is due...

Of course, this generator and plugin wouldn't be as remotely robust if it wasn't for the excellent work of Tobias, Scott, and the rest of the Typo guys.

Installation

Want it? Just gem it:

sudo gem install theme_generator

Or, if you already have it:

sudo gem update theme_generator

If you are on Windows, you can leave out the sudo part.

In the near future I'll be posting a tutorial explaining how to implement user and/or application level themes... In the meantime, if you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to send 'em my way.