Created by Loren Segal in 2008-2009
Creating a template is literally as easy as 1-2-3:
-
Create your templates in a directory. All directories are templates and all templates are directories. The directory name will be the (or part of) the name of your template. Example for template
mytemplate:templates/ mytemplate/ setup.rb section1.erb section2.haml copyright.html -
Setup the "table of contents" of your sections in the
setup.rb:def init super sections 'section1', 'section2', 'copyright' endYour sections can include another template (directory). This will call whatever sections were part of that other template.
A directory does not require a
section.rb. If it is not supplied, it will inherit the setup file from its parent (including its sections). -
Register the
templatespath as your root template directory and run the template:require 'tadpole' Tadpole.register_template_path 'path/to/templates' Tadpole('mytemplate').run
You can override templates by simply registering another template_path and creating
a template of the same name in the new path. Using the mytemplate example from above
we can now make a directory:
custom_templates/
mytemplate/
setup.rb
header.erb
This template will inherit from the template above. Our setup.rb will therefore
contain:
def init
super
sections.unshift 'header'
end
And to run this file all we need to do is:
require 'tadpole'
Tadpole.register_template_path 'path/to/templates' # Register base template path
Tadpole.register_template_path 'path/to/custom_templates' # Register overridden template path
# Running our template will now add our 'header' file to the output
Tadpole('mytemplate').run
Sometimes you may need to encapsulate the output of some sections inside another one. An HTML
template, for example, will usually contain the page body inside the body tag of a more general
"header" template. To set this up, you use the following sections call:
sections 'header', ['section1', 'section2', 'copyright']
You can then call these from your header.erb file as simple yields. Each yield renders
one section in the sub-list:
<html>
<body>
<h1>Section 1</h1>
<%= yield %>
<h1>Section 2</h1>
<%= yield %>
<h1>Copyright</h1>
<%= yield %>
</body>
</html>
Alternatively you can yield all sub-sections with the convenience call all_sections
(in the following Haml example, yield param 's'
contains the section name which would serve as the li's id attribute):
%html
%body
%ol
- all_sections do |s|
%li{:id => s}= yield
Tadpole is a small templating engine that attempts to solve a problem that no other templating engine does: extensibility. When dealing with templates, most engines focus on the formatting of the output content while forgetting about the important task a developer faces of hooking all these 'views' together. While it may seem trivial and worth ignoring, in reality, many templates become plagued with complexity and coupling due to the lack of support beyond the mere presentation of a single file.
Tadpole deals not with the formatting or translation or markup, but rather with the organization of the data as it is outputted. In fact, Tadpole is not markup at all, nor does it care what markup you use, having out of the box support for the obvious template languages in Ruby (ERB, Haml, Markaby, Builder) and the ability to add more. Tadpole is all about information organization, not formatting.
If you need a good visualization of what Tadpole is, think of it as the table of contents for your views. Just as it is important to designing each view and partial of your template, it is important to decide in what order these views will ultimately be organized. Tadpole's job is to store nothing but your table of contents, and then spit it out when you're ready to show it to the world. This technique becomes very powerful in some potentially familiar scenarios. (See the "Real World Examples")
Sufficed to say, you might be wondering what the big deal is. I mean, you're probably getting along just fine without this new concept of tables of contents ...or so you think. The truth is that there are a lot of real-world scenarios where the old-style template production simply doesn't cut it. I can say this because Tadpole was born from one of them.
I'll be honest, Tadpole does not meet every use-case scenario, and it probably never will. But if you're writing a blog app, CMS, customizable forum software or anything that will eventually support customizable templates or theming, Tadpole was made for you. Even if you're just dealing with a lot of template coupling or internationalization code, there's a good chance you're looking at the right tool as well.
Anyone who writes customizable software knows that it requires a lot of de-coupled code. While templates are sometimes considered support files rather than actual software, the same law holds true for them. Coupled templates are bad for theming because your users can't get at the data they want.
The standard solution to this problem is to split your templates up into many 'partials'. That way, any user can just go into the right partial and easily edit what they need without copying all of the template data, right? Wrong. The problem starts when a user wants to start adding or removing partials altogether. In fact, it's actually the smallest changes that cause the biggest problems. Everytime they add one line to every new partial, they pull in another entire file. Once you update that file, the changes no longer sync to the user. Fixed a typo in your template? Your user may never get the memo if he pulled in the file you touched. However, because Tadpole never actually deals with template data, the same setup in Tadpole would not be problematic. Using Tadpole, the user would never even have to touch your templates given a good set of insertion points.
The lesson is, when it comes to customization, there is no partial that is partial enough. Tadpole inevitably suffers from this problem as well. However, once you start thinking in terms of template organization you'll find that it's much harder to decide what part of a view deserves a 'partial' than it is to simply split your template up into a series of cohesive "sections".
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Bob made a Blogging application called "Boblog" and distributed it under the MIT license over the internet. Janet found this application and decided to use it to power her upcoming "100 Carrot Recipes" blog. She was mostly happy with the provided themes but wanted to customize the look of the sidebar by adding a "Favourite Recipes" links section and writing a tidbit about herself. Now "Boblog" was a simplistic blog tool and did not support a multitude of plugins, but did use Tadpole for theming. Janet read about the way customization was done using "Boblog" and got to work making her changes. Janet went into her custom templates directory and created her own new template
janetbecause she had a bad feeling about directly playing with the existing template files (and "Boblog" docs said she didn't need to). Inside that directory she created her new filesfav_recipes.htmlandabout.htmlwhere she inserted her links to various world renowned Carrot Chefs and a story about her dreams of one day meeting them. Now, she wanted her about section to go at the top of the sidebar, but she wanted her own links section to go beneath the regular links section (already provided by "Boblog"). So, as per the docs, she continued to add asetup.rbfile which would connect her new files together with the template. In this file, she simply wrote:inherits 'default_theme' def init super sections.unshift 'about' sections.place('fav_recipes').before('links') endShe then went into "Boblog"'s administration interface and selected the new
janettheme. Voila, her dream of tasty success would finally come true.Three days later, Bob got word from an anonymous tipster of a nasty bug in his software that could potentially lead to harmful attacks if left unfixed. Guess what, that bug was in the sidebar template that Janet was using! He quickly patched the bug and released a fix, notifying all of his users of the changes (Janet was on his mailing list). Because Janet never edited any of the files belonging to "Boblog", all she had to do was download the patch and restart the application without ever having to remake all of her ever-so- important theming changes to her blog.
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Midget Inc. is working on a colourful new site redesign for their mobile widget business. They sell mobile widgets to customers all across the globe and have very strict legal procedures they need to follow when advertising their mobile widgets. In one specific region, they are required by law to show a disclaimer above any advertising images they display. Rather than place region specific logic inside a partial view, they decide to use Tadpole to handle their templating system. They decide to use a folder structure of the following to display their advertising page:
advertising/ setup.rb content.erb images.erb fr/ setup.rb disclaimer.erbadvertising/setup.rbcontains the following:def init; super; sections 'content', 'images' endThe
fr/subdirectory contains the specific content they need for the law-requiring region and the logic to render this template only in that region is controlled by the controller. Because thefr/template automatically inherits its sections from its parent, all they need to do to set up this new logic is put the following in thefr/setup.rb:def init super sections.place('disclaimer').before('images') endAnd the templates can be rendered with:
Tadpole('advertising').run Tadpole('advertising/fr').runRespectively.
That this README was generated by Tadpole. Try it:
ruby examples/example2/run.rb markdown/readme
Copyright 2008 Loren Segal. All code licensed under the MIT License.