Markupslicer: a tool for slicing HTML markup into Rails templates. | Hacker News Reader

Markupslicer: a tool for slicing HTML markup into Rails templates.

markupslicer.com

29 pointslabria7 comments

Is there anything like this that goes from RubyOnRails to Wordpress? My blog.whyspam.me (run on wordpress) is a mirror layout of the main site, but every time I tweak an element on my main (RoR) site, i have to copy the change to wordpress. I understand why so few companies have their blog with the same theme as their site. A tool to cut up layouts in RoR and make wordpress templates would be awesome!

On top of that I'll take django templates too, I don't see why it should be too specific. In the end we have html fragments to do with as we please.

After using it I'll say it does what it says it would and does it well. It's nice and interactive and while it would make a nice local app, It's hardly suitable for a cli utility.

its not JUST html fragments. it actually gives you the real syntax to use in Rails ERB/HAML, including support for variables. i.e. if you select some word and assign name '= @user[name]' to the fragment, it will actually use proper ERB or HAML syntax, i.e. <%= @user[name] %>. etc.

we will definitely add more formats. to decide which to start with we have the vote form on the homepage. so if you want django, please vote for it :)

other formats support is planned. we just launched with the minimum that we ourselves needed. Rails HAML templates :)

Thought for your case we don't only need to add another format (more or less easy) but also support for re-uploading new designs .zip file, which is somewhat harder to implement and so is further down the todo list :)

Why is this a hosted web service and not an command-line utility?

because some people like to point and click. I don't think command line utility would be very fun to use. you would have to open the files in a text editor, at which stage you might as well cut it by hand :). I know both TextMate and vim can extract fragments into rails partials. We are using this for all new projects and its MUCH easier then using a text editor (or command line for that matter)

it could be an open source rails application, of course, but so is a lot of other commercial projects out there :)

It is free for now and we don't plan on adding payments right away (and basics will probably stay free forever), but we do think about monetizing it some day.

For now though we are focused on creating something that people will like and use.

Is it just me, or in the past few months have I seen a lot more browser based web widget builders oozing out of the cracks of the various Cappuccino/Javascript/Ruby/etc frameworks? As html5 ascends over flash's corpse this year, we might just hit an inflection point where the level of sophistication of web builder apps passes the drawbacks by doing more desktop-y things.

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