Forum: Rails Engines [ANN] Beta Testing needed for Toolbawks Packer v1.0.0

Posted by Nathaniel Brown (nshb)
on 2007-09-10 21:32
(Received via mailing list)
Hey.. so I just rearchitected the AssetPackager written by Scott Becker 
into
Toolbawks Packer.

The major change is no more configuration. It's all done automatically 
and
is as automated as possible.

The new plugin now works on a per layout basis. So you toss it in 
wherever
you like, and all the CSS and JS files that were going to be included by
default Rails helpers, are now caught by the Packer and included into a
newly compiled JS and CSS file. Caching is always enabled, so it checks 
to
see what array of files has been grouped, what time the file was last
modiifed, and if any of those are different, it will create a new file.

So here's the rub.

It's as simple as installing the plugin..

script/plugin install https://svn.toolbawks.com/toolbawks_packer/trunk

And then adding one line of code to your layout:

<%= toolbawks_packer('application') %>

The "application" part is the grouping of all the CSS and JS files 
before
it. So if you have alot of packages that you for whatever reason want to
break out into their own, change the package alias and it will do such. 
You
can have as many packers as you want in any layout (ideally, haven't 
tested
this yet though). I used this for my purposes as I have one packer per
layout, as there will be an admin packer and a public packer, both of 
which
I don't want to conflict as they have their own unique CSS and JS files 
that
need to be included depending on what area of the site they are 
accessing.

Would love some feedback. Oh, and it is a Engine, but I made some lazy
attempts to try and make sure it will work as a generic Plugin too. So 
any
testing done as a plugin (without engines) would be awesome to hear 
about.

Enjoy!
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