Same site, multiple branding. Putting out the feelers

Rails
1

Hi all,

Just putting out some general feelers and wondering if anyone has
tackled this issue before in Rails.

Something along the lines of allowing different customers to run their
own mini sites from within the main one to get all the applications and
tools provided by that site. But with the crucial ability to choose
their own layout and colour schemes and drag’n’drop in the services they
want to run as well. Something like:

http://myportal… .or.
http://…/myportal

Given the new asset stuff in Rails 2.0 which I would like to take
advantage of as well I am wondering what kind of mechanisms are already
in place - generally. Of course, I will eventually trawl through the
Rails source to find out specifically but just wanted to hear from
people who may have looked into this already.

Cheers,

Chad.

2

Thanks Greg, a very detailed and useful reply. I think you hit the nail
when you said its all about clean html. The last time I did stuff like
this was over 10 years ago using perl and the biggest problem we faced
was the html. I guess that because we didn’t use css at the time
because of how new and broken it was and :).

I would like the layout to be (in some cases very) different in each
theme but also customizable by the administrator to include “modules”
much like Mambo and that ilk.

Where I can see a challenge is when there is a radical difference
between the skeleton of themes. For example one theme might use nested

    s to display table-like data and another s. This would mean that even some or all of the smaller partials like those used to respond to ajax requests would need to be customized for each theme.

    Your SitePaths class is great and really simplifies things a lot.

    Thanks again for the reply,

    Chad.

3

On Nov 21, 2007, at 4:50 AM, Chad T. wrote:

Just putting out some general feelers and wondering if anyone has
tackled this issue before in Rails.

I’ve done it in something other than Rails, but the methodology is
simple enough, that it doesn’t really matter if it is Rails or not.

Something along the lines of allowing different customers to run their
own mini sites from within the main one to get all the applications
and
tools provided by that site. But with the crucial ability to choose
their own layout and colour schemes and drag’n’drop in the services
they
want to run as well. Something like:

http://myportal… .or.
http://…/myportal

IMO the preferred way is to use subdomains, which I described in this
article:
http://www.railsdev.ws/blog/10/using-subdomains-in-rails-apps/

As for themes, this isn’t as hard as it sounds. First, you need to
use really clean HTML so that CSS can take care of the vast majority
of the work. You want each theme to be its own CSS file(s) which is
easy to programmatically define in the page .

Depending on how radically different you want each theme, you can use
different layouts to assemble partials in a different order etc.
Again, the name of the layout can be declared programatically.

Between combining unique layouts and CSS files you have the majority
of the work done. All that’s left is a file structure that makes it
easy to add & remove themes. Another article on that same site looks
at organizing modular site structures which would apply well to themes.

Additionally, in my apps I use a simple object called sitePaths for
all paths within the app. Something like this:

class SitePaths

attr_reader :layouts, :controls, :edpNavImgs, :panels, :mastheadViews, :
mastheadImgs,
:images, :audio, :video, :flash, :downloads

def initialize

@layouts = ‘/layouts/’
@panels = ‘_panels/’
@controls = ‘/controls/’
@mastheadViews = ‘/layouts/masthead/’
@mastheadImgs = ‘/masthead/images/’

@images = ‘/media/images/’
@audio = ‘/media/audio/’
@video = ‘/media/video/’
@flash = ‘/media/flash/’
@downloads = ‘/media/downloads/’

end
end

I declare an object @sitePaths in application.rb so everywhere
there’s a need for a path, I can do something like

@sitePaths.controls + 'btnFormSave.gif'

If the site needs to support themes, I simply modify the above
SitePaths code to allow for a theme name:

def initialize(themeName)
@layouts = “/#{themeName}/layouts/”
@panels = ‘_panels/’ # not affacted by themes
@controls = “/#{themeName}/controls/”
@mastheadViews = “/#{themeName}/layouts/masthead/”
@mastheadImgs = “/#{themeName}/masthead/images/”
…
end

The application code stays exactly the same:

@sitePaths.controls + 'btnFormSave.gif'

But now the location of that file is programmatically altered by
pulling a theme name from an accont profile stored under the name of
the site subdomain.

Given the new asset stuff in Rails 2.0…

I had a very quick look at that, and it seems to be quite similar to
the system I built into my own framework years ago to support this
very kind of site you’re looking at. I was thinking I’d have to add
my own layer to deal with that, so it’d be cool to see Rails have
something built in.

Really, that’s all there is to it in terms of taking care of layout
and appearance. As far as assembling collections of different
functionalities per sub-site, that’s just a little more work in
providing a UI for the user to select what they want to build a data
structure defining a layout and the contents of each layout panel,
and making the innards of your layouts use variables to determine
which partial will be loaded into each panel.

– gw (www.railsdev.ws)