= MasterView - Rails-optimized (x)html friendly template engine 

MasterView is a ruby/rails optimized HTML/XHTML friendly template engine. 
It is designed to use the full power and productivity of rails including 
layouts, partials, and rails html helpers while still being editable/styleable 
in a WYSIWYG HTML editor.  

MasterView is distributed as a gem or a plugin. You may install it as a gem and then generate a lightweight plugin which mainly refers to the gem *or* you can simply install as a plugin which is self contained. I personally prefer installing as a gem for ease of management, however if you are running at a shared hosting environment you might not have authority to install this gem so you may install as a self contained plugin.

If you are interested in the background story behind all this, it is at the end of this page.

Author:: Jeff Barczewski
Email:: jeff.barczewski @ gmail.com
Rubyforge project:: masterview
Website:: http://masterview.org
License:: MIT open source license like Rails

== 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
- 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. Scaffold generate initial templates or work from existing html prototype.
- Use one master file to drive all related sections, simplifying editing.
- 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

== Prerequisites

Requires::
	No external dependencies

Optional::
	tidy (gem) and tidy library - if these are installed you can use tidy to cleanup html into valid xhtml for use by MasterView
	log4r (gem) - if this gem is installed then MasterView will use it for logging otherwise it defaults to using built in Logger.

== Installation

Install in one of the two following ways depending on whether you can use gems or not. 

=== Installation using gems (if you are able to use gems)

If you can use gems you may simply do the following

gem install masterview_gem_pack

Now your gem is installed and you can skip these steps in the future. After creating your rails directory, change directory to it and run the following to create a very lightweight plugin instance for this application mainly consisting of an init.rb file which will get loaded at runtime. This init.rb refers to the gem for everything but allows you to override any constants or setup that has been provided. See MasterView module masterview.rb for a list of the available constants.

script/generate masterview_plugin

After this MasterView is ready for use. Skip down to the Usage section for more details. 

=== Installation without using gems, install as plugin

script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/masterview

This will copy entire MasterView system into your vendor/plugin/masterview directory. You may tweak its init.rb to override any MasterView constants at runtime. See MasterView module masterview.rb for a list of available constants. Note that if you don't have svn (subversion) installed, you may also retrieve the plugin package (masterview_plugin.tgz or masterview_plugin.zip) from http://rubyforge.org/projects/masterview and simply extract into vendor/plugins/masterview 

== Usage

You may add MasterView attributes to existing (x)html or you may use the masterview generator to create a complete working application. The generator can create controllers, models, and the MasterView template file similar to how the built-in generator works. Simply change directory to your rails application and run the following

script/generate masterview YourModelName [YourControllerName] [--showAll | --showOnlyNew | --showOnlyList]

To make it easier to use this template at design time, some design time css stylesheets are included in the file to hide all sections except one. By default the NEW section is the only one shown. Other options are --showAll which makes all sections visible or --showOnlyList which shows only the LIST section. When you are editing the masterview file you may comment/uncomment one of the other css files to show a different section.