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 both a gem and as a fully self-contained plugin. You may install it as a gem and then generate a lightweight plugin in your Rails application which references the gem or you can simply install a complete copy as a self-contained plugin in your application.
If you are new to Ruby and not yet familiar with gem,
the standard Ruby package manager, see the
MasterView Gem Tips section at the end of this document
for additional information and links to the RubyGems documentation.
MasterView has been tested on Ruby 1.8.4 and Rails 1.1.2 on *nix and Windows.
| Required: | |
| No required external dependencies | |
| Optional: | |
| tidy |
If HTML tidy support is installed, you can use tidy to
automatically clean up html in your templates into valid xhtml
prior to MasterView template parsing.
You will need both the tidy processor and the Ruby gem tidy library installed on your system.
Visit the HTML Tidy project on sourceforge to download and install tidy on your system.
To install the Ruby gem tidy library:
gem install tidy |
| Log4r | A flexible logging library for Ruby that will be used by Masterview if installed.
(If not, the standard ruby library Logger is used).
Visit the Log4r project on sourceforge for more information.
To install the Ruby gem Log4r library:
gem install log4r |
(see the
MasterView Gem Tips section below if you need more information about the RubyGem package manager)
You can install MasterView either
by using the standard Ruby gem package manager
to install the MasterView gem
or
you can install a copy of the MasterView plugin in your application.
Masterview releases are published on
rubyforge.org
and can be downloaded and installed manually or installed using the standard procedures described here.
Tip:
Installing MasterView as a gem is generally
easier to manage and maintain.
The gem package manager installs MasterView in your
system Ruby library path, from which it is then available
to all your Ruby applications.
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.
To install the current release of MasterView as a gem,
run the Ruby gem package manager from the command line:
gem install masterview_gem_pack
(answer Yes when prompted whether to install the dependent masterview component gems)
This will install MasterView in the Ruby library on your system. The MasterView API documentation will be added your RubyGems documentation and made available in the installed Gems documentation that you access by running your RubyGems RDoc server.
In order to activate support for MasterView templates in a Rails application,
you need to install masterview as a Rails plugin in that application.
If you are adding MasterView support to an existing Rails application, open a command shell and cd to the directory containing the rails application.
cd /path/to/myrailsapp
If you are starting a new application, create a directory to contain your application and run the rails generator to generate the standard framework structure of a skeleton rails application.
cd /path/to/myrails mkdir mynewapp cd mynewapp rails
Now run the masterview_plugin_generator in your Rails application directory
to install MasterView as a plugin.
The plugin generator will create a lightweight plugin for masterview
in your rails vendor/plugins directory, consisting
of an init.rb file which causes the MasterView template
engine to be loaded during Rails startup.
Use one of the following two forms of running the generator. (On Windows, you need to explicitly invoke Ruby to run the script)
script/generate masterview_plugin ruby script/generate masterview_plugin
The lightweight masterview plugin runs the template engine
using the installed gem, but allows you to provide application-specific
configuration settings using settings files that you can provide in
your application's config/masterview directory.
Congratulations - you are now ready to use MasterView in your application!
To run MasterView with the default
configuration settings, which are designed to be appropriate for a
typical Rails application, simply start creating .html
template views containing MasterView mv: attribute markup
and run your application.
For information about customizing MasterView configuration settings, see the MasterView Configuration Guide.
For an overview and information about using MasterView templates, see the
MasterView User's Guide
and the detailed
MasterView Directives Reference.
For information about using the masterview_generator
to assist you in creating templates, see the
MasterView User's Guide.
If you are unable or otherwise do not wish to install
masterview as a gem,
you can install a full copy of the template engine and its generators
as a plugin in your rails application.
If you have Subversion client support installed on your system,
you can install the latest release directly from the
release build archive on rubyforge.
In a command shell, cd to the directory containing
your rails application and run the standard Rails
plugin script.
(On Windows, you need to explicitly invoke Ruby to run the script)
script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/masterview/tags/masterview ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/masterview/tags/masterview
This will copy the complete MasterView
system into your vendor/plugins/masterview directory.
If you do not have a Subversion (svn) client,
you can manually download a copy of the masterview
plugin package from
rubyforge.org/projects/masterview.
(Go to the Files tab and
select the latest release version D.D.D)
Download either masterview_plugin-D.D.D.tgz
or masterview_plugin-D.D.D.zip
according to the preferred compressed files format for your system.
Unpack the plugin into the vendor/plugins directory
of your rails application to install the masterview plugin.
Congratulations - you are now ready to use MasterView in your application!
To run MasterView with the default
configuration settings, which are designed to be appropriate for a
typical Rails application, simply start creating .html
template views containing MasterView mv: attribute markup
and run your application.
For information about customizing MasterView configuration settings, see the MasterView Configuration Guide.
For an overview and information about using MasterView templates, see the
MasterView User's Guide
and the detailed
MasterView Directives Reference.
For information about using the masterview_generator
to assist you in creating templates, see the
MasterView User's Guide.
RubyGems is the standard package manager for Ruby.
It makes it easy to download, install, and manage Ruby libraries.
A nice User Guide and complete command reference are available at
rubygems.org.
MasterView releases are published on the MasterView project on rubyforge.
There are 3 components published as gems in a MasterView release:
masterview - the MasterView template enginemasterview_gem_plugin_generator - a Rails generator for creating the necessary entry (a small loader stub) in your rails application's vendor/plugins directory to load the MasterView template engine gem as a Rails plugin in your applicationmasterview_generator - Rails generator for creating MasterView templates in your application [### NEEDS MORE EXPLANATION###]Most of the time you'll want to simply install the all-in-one easy-install gem that brings in everything:
masterview_gem_pack - the MasterView value-pak for easy install - installs the base MasterView template engine plus the supporting Rails generatorsTip: the gems named masterview_parser
and masterview_gem_plugin_generator are obsolete versions from early alpha
releases. They are obsolete and should be ignored.