Middleman Ethos

A prototyping framework for Middleman in active development. Currently using Bootstrap 3 and jQuery, but this will likely change.

Key Features

• Basic homepage template and navigation system
• Contact Us form template with thank you page
• Environment-based project configuration
• SassDoc support
• Prototype transactional emails with send_email() helper and mailcatcher
• Built-in JavaScript form validation by adding the class validate to your form and adding the class required to each required field. Support for type=email is built-in thanks to the jQuery Validation Plugin

Installation

This is a middleman template that can be installed in your middleman project templates directory. First install middleman as a Ruby gem.

gem install middleman

Then clone the repository into your templates folder.

git clone git@github.com:timknight/middleman-ethos.git ~/.middleman/middleman-ethos

Create a new project using Ethos

middleman init [PROJECTNAME] -T middleman-ethos

Project Configuration

Project information is found in /data/config.yml. The YAML file supports multi-environment configuration by adding the values within keys for "development" and "build". A custom site helper is available called project_setting which takes the YAML key value as either a string or a symbol: project_setting(:title) or project_setting("title").

Page Configuration

Each page takes advantage of some basic frontmatter that's built into Middleman. Pages support the following frontmatter:

---
title:
nav:
subnav:
description:
---

• title: is prepended into the page title
• nav: used to determine the current page's primary navigation state
• subnav: used to determine the current page's secondary navigation state
• description: used to create a description meta tag for that page

Mailcatcher Support and Email Prototyping

Support for Mailcatcher is built in for the development mode only. This allows for prototyping transactional emails. To get started, make sure to install the mailcatcher gem and that it is running.

gem install mailcatcher

• See /contact/thankyou.html.erb for an example of using the send_email() helper.
• send_email([template], [subject: Subject Line (optional)], [to: to@email.com (optional)]
• Host configuration, from, and to addresses are configured in the /data/config.yml file.
• Mailer templates should be located in /mailers/ and do not support ERB.

Pesticide Support

Pesticide has been built into the CSS. To turn on Pesticide debugging edit /utilities/_variables.css and change $pesticide-debug to true.

SassDoc Support

Generate documentation with SassDoc using sassdoc source/assets/stylesheets/ docs/. Precompiled documentation can be found within the docs folder. Alternatively you can generate using rake sassdoc.

Planned To-Do

Currently I'm using Bootstrap here, but my plan is to move further away from Bootstrap while creating more of a OOCSS model and using Neat or Susy for the grid system. Stay tuned for continued updates.