Haml | existence, refactored

Starting a “professional” Rails 3.1 app with Web App Theme, Devise, and Kaminari

Update: This tutorial is way out of date. If you want to create a modern (ie. 2015) app, please use a generator like RailsBricks.

With the recent release of web-app-theme providing Rails 3.1 support, it’s time once again for me to write a tutorial on how to earn money from cheap clients who can’t afford designers.

For reference, the previous tutorial can be read here.

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Every Rails developer knows how to create a Rails app. It’s easy as

rails new APP-NAME-HERE

But how many know how to create an app from scratch that looks good enough to sell to clients i.e. with slick design, authentication, authorization, and all that? Sure, there are tutorials out there that cover those components, but most of them cover them only in isolation from each other. A quick tutorial containing multiple components at a time would be a valuable resource to anyone planning to start a new app.

As the resident dilettante in these parts, I’ve decided to create such a tutorial based on a recent demo I made for a prospective client.

This post will discuss how to create a Rails 3.1 application that looks good enough to sell to clients (of course, YMMV) while still having components found in “professional” apps. This tutorial will cover the following:

Andrea Franz’s web-app-theme gem – this gem generates themes for your web app (hence the name). The demo and the list of available themes can be found on this page.
Devise – our authentication module. Authlogic‘s fine, but I find Devise’s approach less obtrusive.
Haml – replaces Erb. Not perfect (e.g. screws up with inline a tags) but the drastic decrease in code makes passing it up difficult.
Rspec – replaces Test::Unit. Only setup will be covered in this post, actual usage is left to the reader.
Kaminari – gem for pagination. We’re going to use it in place of the previous gem will_paginate

Rest of the tutorial is below the cut.

Continue reading “Starting a “professional” Rails 3.1 app with Web App Theme, Devise, and Kaminari”

[Follow Up] Styling the Sign-up form in Web App Theme

Two days ago, a reader emailed me asking for help on my previous tutorial. There I was able to convert Devise’s sign in form to use Web App Theme’s CSS, but I didn’t provide details on how to style the other form: the sign-up form.

The change required is pretty simple actually, just as long as you understand what I did in that tutorial. First, you need to tell Rails to override Devise’s RegistrationsController’s layout to use the “sign” layout (just as what we did with SessionsController which handles the sign in):

    config.to_prepare do
      Devise::SessionsController.layout "sign"
      Devise::RegistrationsController.layout "sign"
    end

Then modify the app/views/devise/registrations/new.html.haml file accordingly. If all goes well, you should get something like:

The steps to convert the “Forgot your password?” page is left to the reader.

Starting a “professional” Rails app with Haml, Rspec, Devise, and Web App Theme

Update 2: This tutorial is way out of date. If you want to create a modern (ie. 2015) app, please use a generator like RailsBricks.

Update: Tutorial for Rails 3.1 here!

Every Rails developer knows how to create a Rails app. It’s easy as

rails new APP-NAME-HERE

As the resident dilettante in these parts, I’ve decided to create such a tutorial based on a recent demo I made for a prospective client.

This post will discuss how to create a Rails 3 application that looks good enough to sell to clients (of course, YMMV) while still having components found in “professional” apps. This tutorial will cover the following:

Andrea Franz’s web-app-theme gem – I only recently found out about this theme generator gem. Had I discovered this sooner, I might not have made “I hate web design” a catchphrase. Basically this gem generates themes for your web app (hence the name). The demo and the list of available themes can be found on this page. The main downside to this gem is the lack of tutorials on the net about it. Hopefully this post will give people an idea what to expect with the gem.
Devise – our authentication module. Authlogic‘s fine, but I find Devise’s approach less obtrusive.
Haml – replaces Erb. Not perfect (e.g. screws up with inline a tags) but the drastic decrease in code makes passing it up difficult.
Rspec – replaces Test::Unit. Only setup will be covered in this post, actual usage is left to the reader.
will_paginate – gem for pagination. Everybody uses it, so what the hell…

Rest of the tutorial is below the cut.

Continue reading “Starting a “professional” Rails app with Haml, Rspec, Devise, and Web App Theme”