It’s been a long time since I’ve added anything to my portfolio. But just before leaving the online world for christmas, I worked with David (and indirectly Marten Veldthuis and Jon Hicks - kudos for coming up with initial ideas to work from) to redesign/rebrand/refurbish the web presence of Ruby on Rails.
Reactions have been mainly positive, which is great naturally, with a bunch of not-so-positive reactions intertwined, which is also graet naturally. We’re still ironing out the remainding few issues, and since launching even the logo has undergone refinement for the better (behold the power of open sourcing).
The project was pretty interesting since we wanted to give the existing parts of the Rails web presence a uniform look’n’feel, mixing Instiki with Trac with RDoc with new additions WordPress and Hierarki. That’s 3 different scripting languages and 5 different ways of templating. We “cheated” using iframes to include the headers where needed, but the valid (well, nearly valid at least), semantic (X)HTML really came through for us, enabling us to use a common CSS file for all areas.
I was kind of perplexed by the use of iframes myself, can't quite
understand why you didn't use a server-side method of inclusion instead?
We opted for the iframe approach since it seemed like the path of least resistance, and indeed I believe it to have been.
We could have used some sort of serverside inclusion instead, however I
am unaWe opted for the iframe approach since it seemed like the path of
least resistance, and indeed I believe it to have been. We could have
used some sort of serverside inclusion instead, however I am unaware of
any method that would've proven flexible and maintainable enough for us
to use.
The only alternative I can think of is to include the header and footer
in the HTML/templates/code for each application we're using. That'd
mean multiple ways of doing the inclusion (due to multiple scripting
languages/templating systems), and modifying the source of the
applications who don't allow for inclusion of files over HTTP (Instiki,
Hierarki, and RDoc off the top of my head).
I admit feeling dirty for doing the clientside inclusion (frames, eew),
but it works cross-application without slowing down the display of each
application (noticably at least) and allows us the flexibility and
maintainability of having a single script for outputting the header.
Not really related but I'm stopping by to say hi since it's de-lurker day… so hi and Happy New Year! :)