= sinatra_more

== Introduction

This will be a plugin which expand sinatra's capabilities in many ways. Not ready to be used yet!

Let me expand briefly on what I want to accomplish with this gem. I love sinatra but if I want to use it
for any non-trivial application I very quickly miss a lot of the extra tools provided by rails.

Now the obvious question is, why not just use rails? Well, that would be the easy answer. However, until
version 3 comes along, Rails is quite a large framework and I love the spirit of sinatra which acts
as a thin wrapper on top of rack allowing middleware to do most of the work and pulling in complexity
only as needed. 

My goal with this extension is to maintain the spirit of Sinatra and at the same time create a standard library
of tools, helpers and components that will make Sinatra scale to allow for extremely complex apps.

Here is a small list of what sinatra_more might contain:

* Lots of generic view helpers (tag, content_tag, ...)
* Asset helpers (link_to, image_tag, javascript_include_tag, ...)
* Form helpers and form builder support (form_tag, form_for, text_field, ...)
* Plug and play components for Warden (authentication), ActiveRecord (datastore) and MongoMapper (datastore)

Keep in mind, the user will be able to pull in components as necessary and leave out any that are not required.

Obviously the project isn't ready for primetime yet but please help me brainstorm and 
fork the project if you have any ideas that will help flesh out this project!

== Usage

This extension can be easily registered into any existing sinatra application. You can require
different components based on which pieces are useful for your application.

  # app.rb 
  require 'sinatra/base'
  require 'sinatra_more'

  class Application < Sinatra::Base
    register SinatraMore
    register SinatraMore::WardenPlugin
    # (Not yet) register SinatraMore::MarkupHelpers
    # (Not yet) register SinatraMore::RenderHelpers
    # (Not yet) register SinatraMore::FormHelpers
  end

This will then allow you to use whichever components that have been registered. A breakdown is below:

=== MarkupPlugin

This component provides a great deal of view helpers related to html markup generation.
There are helpers for generating tags, forms, links, images, and more. Most of the basic
methods should be very familiar to anyone who has used rails view helpers.

...list methods here...

=== RenderPlugin

This component provides a number of rendering helpers for sinatra, making the process
of displaying templates far smoother. This plugin also has support for useful additions
such as partials (with support for :collection) into the templating system.

...list methods here...

=== WardenPlugin

This component provides out-of-the-box support for Warden authentication. With this
plugin registered, warden will be automatically required, configured and helpers will be
provided to make interacting with warden dead simple.

...list methods here...

== Note on Patches/Pull Requests
 
* Fork the project.
* Make your feature addition or bug fix.
* Add tests for it. This is important so I don't break it in a
  future version unintentionally.
* Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history.
* Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

== Copyright

Copyright (c) 2009 Nathan Esquenazi. See LICENSE for details.