Blue

Blue is a minimal in design, but full-featured template language for Ruby.

Features

• template inheritance (the only template language in Ruby I'm aware of that does)
• blocks
• filters
• functions
• super convenient variable substitution
• has a loader that caches pre-generated templates

Currently version 0.9. It's nearly fully functional and seems stable but it still needs a few small features, needs to be battle tested more, and I need to learn how to make it a gem. Other todos before release include Tilt support, a nice interface for Sinatra, and partials/includes.

Also, I'm pretty new to Ruby so please feel free to offer style suggestions.

Basic Usage

require 'blue'
loader = Blue::TemplateLoader.new './templates'
namespace = {:entries => Weblog.entries, :breadcrumbs => breadcrumbs}
loader.get(:weblog).render(namespace)

Template Language

There are only a few constructs. Here's an example template, I'll include more documentation later.

@extends base

@block content

% prevday = nil
% entries.each do |entry|
    % day = entry.creation_dt.strftime('%B %d, %Y')
    % if day != prevday
        <h2>
            <a title="permanent link for $day" href="$entry.dateuri">$entry.creation_dt|datefmt('%A, %B %d, %Y')</a>
        </h2>
    %end
    <h3><a href="$entry.url">$entry.title</a></h3>
    
    $printEntry(entry)
    % prevday = day
% end

<p>There were ${entries.length} entries, and you can print a dollar sign like ${'$'}.
Though of course a dollar sign won't be misinterpreted if it appears by itself $ or
as part of something that doesn't look like a variable reference (i.e. like money $3.50)</p>
@end

@def printEntry(entry)
	<div id="id$entry.id">
        <h3><a href="$entry.permalink">$entry.title</a></h3>
        @filter off
        $entry.rawhtml
        @filter
    </div>
@end

As you can see, a line starting with '%' just escapes out to Ruby code, and anything in a ${...} is a Ruby expression. Variable substitution is done by starting something that looks like a variable reference or function call with a dollar sign. Blue tries to be somewhat smart about what "looks like" a variable substitution but it's not foolproof. You can define functions, use filters, template inheritance, and so on.

License

MIT licensed