80beans

Introducing WysiHat Engine

Since we were tired of the ugliness and size of TinyMCE — our previous WYSIWYG solution —, we decided to see if we could find a good replacement.

Luckily 37signals released a WYSIWYG editor last year called WysiHat, the “eventually better open source WYSIWYG editor”, so we tried it out. It was simple, no fancy themes or color schemes, just the backend code.

After playing with it for a while, we found a lot of hidden and undocumented features like including images or adding unordered lists. We decided to fork the project to write some more examples.

WysiHat is a great project and has a lot of potential, but probably hasn’t got the attention it deserves for a while now. There are some missing features you’d expect from a WYSIWYG editor, but the general idea is very, very good.

Joshua Peek told us the project is on hold; “We’re planning to revisit the wysiwyg stuff in early 2010. So you can expect me to jump back in then.”, but we hope there will be more activity from the rest of the community before that.

The Engine

We built the standard stuff like image uploading and html editing using WysiHat for a project we’re working on and we thought others could use it so we built the “WysiHat Rails Engine” and released it to the world.
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Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets

Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets, or simply “Sass” is a great way of structuring your CSS using Ruby syntax. It spices up writing your CSS in several ways (use constants, do calculations, etc), with the most notable feature being the ability to use nested rules. This turns this:

#main
  :width 97%

  p, div
    :font-size 2em
    a
      :font-weight bold

  pre
    :font-size 3em

into

#main {
  width: 97%; }
  #main p, #main div {
    font-size: 2em; }
    #main p a, #main div a {
      font-weight: bold; }
  #main pre {
    font-size: 3em; }

Just save your Sass file as public/stylesheets/sass/application.sass (filename may vary), and Sass will generate a public/stylesheets/application.css. This file will be re-generated after making changes to your *.sass file. Don’t forget to set an ignore property on your *.css files, since you don’t want to have those under version control.

We decided to use it for all our new projects, which has boosted our CSS productivity. Because of the structured syntax, also the not-so-CSS-savvy programmers can easily find what they are looking for in the CSS file. Highly recommended! See the above mentioned website for detailed installation and usage instructions.

Tip: to convert your plain old CSS to Sass, use the “css2sass” command line tool (included with haml): css2sass oldfile.css newfile.sass.

Rails 2.0 released

Today the release of Rails framework version 2.0 was announced. We have been developing using release candidates for a while and are happy with it, especially the RESTful resources.