Blog

I've decided to convert my infrequently updated blog from Wordpress to Typo.  Not because there is anything wrong with Wordpress.  In fact, I quite like Wordpress but I wanted to try out Typo and I thought it would be educational to have a closer look at a real world Rails app.  The install process was pretty straight forward.  I created my own theme out of the scribbish theme provided.

I did find that the way that Typo managed it's template system to be quite interesting.  While I was familiar with being able to programatically set the layout for a controller or the whole application, what I really wanted to do was to to be able to override any view template for a specific theme.  I've done this kind of thing in PHP but I really wanted to do this "the rails way".  What Typo does is quite elegant although it's a bit risky.  Typo overrides the ActionView::Base function full_template_path which will produce an absolute path for a template.  By default this resolves to templates in the RAILS_ROOT/apps/views directory but Typo overrides this and sets up a list of serach paths to attempt to resolve to that includes RAILS_ROOT/themes/#{themename} .  There are a couple of other tricks to get stylesheets, javascript and image directories to live in the theme directory.