Demo Project

[TheNotary]

Sorry for the issue bombardment, I'm on an OSS binge apparently, lol

I think it might be nice to have a demo project that use ruby-bbcode. There are three immediate benefits I can see.

1. To aid in development, we can visually take a look at what ruby-bbcode looks like when rendered on a page.

2. To aid in consumption, we can show prospective web developers how easy and straightforward it is to use the gem.

3. To aid in consumption, we can recommend basic css styling to make things look ok.

I have been playing around with a really ugly looking demo. I included twitter bootstrap in the hopes that it would just make everything look fine, but no such luck, lol.

What I have is absolutely NOT finished (actually, I found a new bug by chance and worked on tracking that thing down). What I have so far isn't really even suitable enough for aiding development, but you can have a peek at what I've done so far at https://ruby-bbcode-demo.herokuapp.com/ . Code is at https://github.com/TheNotary/ruby-bbcode-demo you can see it's pretty bare bones now. I'd submit my work CSS, but we only use the video and image tags. If you have some HTML/CSS already made, perhaps that would be good to put up on heroku and link to from the readme.

I think eventually it would be good to show the users a list of all the codes, what it looks like when they're rendered, and then finally give them a little input box they can use to submit there own forum post or article.

Let me know your thoughts on deploying a live demo project. And if you don't feel a demo project will be of aid, feel free to close this issue, I feel I've dragged up enough issues in the past 16 hours :)

[veger]

Very good idea! :)

I currently use the gem in a Rails application (simple blog), with preview capabilities:

• A textarea contains the bbcode
• Underneath the preview is shown (when an update button is clicked, using Ajax), or the BBCodeErrorTemplate output when something went wrong.
• Above the errors are shown as a list.

My only CSS (ATM) is making the errors red in the BBCodeErrorTemaplte output :)
(and some stuff to actually place everything on the page)

So I do not have some complete HTML/CSS set to give to you. Now that I think of it, I can also benefit from the demo app ;) :P

When I am back home (after work), I can have a look at your repository and see how you setup things.

[TheNotary]

My code is very minimal (yet using rails for a quick free heroku deployment). I just wanted to do something quick and thought it would be online in 10 mins. It turned out worse than I expected though. I think if I were going to sit down at the UI, I'd try again modeling it after twitterbootstraps demo pages like http://getbootstrap.com/css/#type

99% of the work was hand typing /app/views/pages/_tags.html.erb it still needs copy/pasting into a more presentable form, but having that file somewhat fleshed out is a bit of a time saver.

[TheNotary]

Hey Veger, how are you? Looks like you're taking it easy on OSS this summer. I hope you're doing well.

I've been busy with work and fun myself. I've recently discovered bower packages for packaging client side assets into distributable, easy to deploy chunks. In the rails world, there's something called rails-assets.org which downloads bower packages from github, and packages the assets into gems, which, when you include them in your rails, it makes them available to the asset pipeline, so the end code is this:

(app/assets/stylesheets/application.css)

.
.
.
 *= require bootstrap
 *= require_tree .
 *= require_self
 */

I miss working on this project, but haven't been able to find the time. I think when the weather turns for me, I'll have time to put together something really nice for demonstration purposes and possibly something 'forum-grade' that devs would eagerly use as their styling of choice when the want to rapidly drop ruby-bbcode into their web apps.

[veger]

Hi, I am fine. A bit busy with a new job and chores around the house. :) So indeed no(t much) time for OSS (or any other kind of SW)...

I have seen the bower packages, but I did not see the advantages compared to gems. (True, I did not look into them). It would indeed be nice to work on the project, hopefully there will be time soon..! We'll see.

[TheNotary]

Btw, the ruby gems are definitely the way to go with things in the ruby world, but 'under the hood' (with regard to rails-assets.org style gems) they're actually based on the bower packaging system, though that system in fact seems to have evolved from NodeJS.

I look forward to when we can both come back to this :)