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Gonzalo Garramuno

2007-Oct-16 08:19 UTC

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview

After trying masterview for a week, I''ve gone back to using plain rails
.rhtml files.

The reasons or problems I found with masterview were:

a) Extremely slow updates sometimes.  I''m on an AMD4400 Dual and 
sometimes some refreshes would take like 10 seconds in development mode, 
compared to the 2-3 seconds with .rhtml files.

b) Updates would not happen and the only reason you''d know is by having
to switch to the admin page to see what went wrong.  Rails already has a 
notice mechanism.  Why not use it when a page cannot be created due to 
some syntax or other conflict?

c) Lack of use of layouts.  Masterview uses some main page for the 
layout page, and I found that to be extremely counter productive.  For 
one, I could never remember which one was it.  And any change on it also 
often lead to out-of-sync issues, forcing you again another visit to the 
admin page.

I found those issues to be killer features and realized that masterview 
ended up not helping me but slowing me down.

-- 
Gonzalo Garramu?o

Film Aura
A New Dawn in Media Companies

gga at filmaura.com
http://www.filmaura.com

Deb Lewis

2007-Oct-16 18:35 UTC

head link

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview

Gonzalo - thanks for the feedback, it''s useful (tho your negative 
conclusion is regrettable)

RE: page cannot be created due to some syntax error

oops, that''s a problem I''ve been meaning to fix for months and
haven''t
gotten to; I''ll get that fixed because it''s incredibly
baffling if you
have a typo or syntax error that fails strict xml parsing of the xhtml.

Workaround: there''s a config option to run tidy on the front-end of 
masterview''s template processing, that tends to patch up dopey mistakes
as well as sloppy html markup.

    http://masterview.org/configuration.html#mv_template_parsing_options

RE: lack of use of layouts and MV use of main page which can get out of 
sync

This gets into an area of different ways you can use masterview 
templates (and isn''t really discussed at all in our documentation).  
All the examples and Jeff''s samples show using a master main page, but 
it turns out that''s not the only technique.

I actually use MasterView templates solely for the content pages of my 
site, with standard rails layouts used in the site rendering in the 
normal fashion.  This means that when I''m editing my content pages at 
development I don''t see the site framing that the rails layouts add 
(headers, nav sidebars, etc) provide if I''m using a WYSIWYG editor or 
checking the page directly in a browser, but for me that''s an 
acceptable degree of development-time fidelity.  

I want the content of my pages to edit and render with reasonable 
fidelity at edit time, so I wrap a standard little boilerplate html 
page around content chunks to hook up ref to stylesheet (sample below), 
but I don''t use the mv:import facility that would show the full layout 
at design time.  This gives me the attribute markup notation I want for 
the dynamic aspects in my content pages, but doesn''t introduce syncing 
problems of trying to keep content pages updated if I change the layout.

~ Deb

<html>
<head>... boilerplate title + link to my stylesheet... </head>
<body>
<div mv:generate="{template_path}" mv:omit_tag="">

... page content to pour into layout slot (html, mv directives, etc)

</div>
</body>
</html>

Jeff Barczewski

2007-Oct-22 16:28 UTC

head link

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview

On 10/16/07, Gonzalo Garramuno <gga at filmaura.com>
wrote:>
>
> After trying masterview for a week, I''ve gone back to using plain
rails
> .rhtml files.

Sorry that it didn''t prove to be a success for you.

The big win is for people who work with designers that want to manipulate
their pages in a WYSIWYG tool like Dreamweaver or NVU. The fact that they
work with it directly in their editor, update the pages, save it and have it
quickly be available to users (roundtripping through out life cycle of
project) is the main feature over other templating techniques.

If .rhtml works best for you, then go with that. Everyone''s needs are
different.

I appreciate you taking the time to mention things we can improve though,
that will help as we continue to refine the project.

The reasons or problems I found with masterview were:>
> a) Extremely slow updates sometimes.  I''m on an AMD4400 Dual and
> sometimes some refreshes would take like 10 seconds in development mode,
> compared to the 2-3 seconds with .rhtml files.

I haven''t seen anywhere near that sort of delay on my machines many of
which
are less powerful than that, but there would have to be some delay in a
refresh if you have changed files, since it has to parse and generate rhtml
before the actual rhtml is used, thus there will be some overhead, but only
when things have changed and new rhtml needs to be generated.

Also just to clarify for future readers, the extra overhead is only when
regenerating rhtml files, after they are regenerated and cached, system
should perform identically to rhtml only site. It''s also recommended
for
production to have MasterView generate the rhtml to the file system to save
memory and one can even deploy the rhtml to a production server without even
having MasterView installed, it isn''t needed once the rhtml is
generated.

> b) Updates would not happen and the only reason you''d know is by
having
> to switch to the admin page to see what went wrong.  Rails already has a
> notice mechanism.  Why not use it when a page cannot be created due to
> some syntax or other conflict?

As Deb confirmed, we are looking at better error detection and reporting.

c) Lack of use of layouts.  Masterview uses some main page for
the> layout page, and I found that to be extremely counter productive.  For
> one, I could never remember which one was it.  And any change on it also
> often lead to out-of-sync issues, forcing you again another visit to the
> admin page.

Just to clarify for other readers, MasterView can use (and generate)
layouts, but the issue Gonzalo is referring to is the fact that when you are
having MasterView generate a layout, one file will be generating the layout
and the other files are importing the layout. The importing into the other
pages is so that you can get a true WYSIWYG view of all of your pages, not
just pieces.

So if a layout changes, you have to click rebuild outdated files from admin
screen or use a rake task to do this. We did not want to make this part
automatic, to make sure that you deliberately wanted to do this and only the
developer would know when is a good time to do the rebuild (in case they
were editing files).

As Deb mentioned, there are many ways to organize your files, we typically
put the layout in with the list template (which is typically the default
view), but one could organize in many other ways including just naming a
view as something_layout.html and then having all the other views import it.

Also note that rebuilding the html templates is only necessary if you want
the changes to the layout to appear in your other files when using them in a
WYSIWYG editor, you do not need to rebuild in order for the changes to be
used across all the views at runtime. So rebuild is only needed so that
designer''s templates are in sync, if you don''t care about that
then you can
skip rebuilding altogether or do it whenever it is convenient.

We are also going to research if we might be able to leverage
Dreamweaver''s
abilities for rebuilding layout used across pages.

Thanks for taking the time to document your troubles, it will help us
improve the project for others. I wish you all the best in your endeavors.

Blessings,

Jeff

-- 
Jeff Barczewski, MasterView core team
Inspired Horizons Ruby on Rails Training and Consultancy
http://inspiredhorizons.com/
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Masterview users - Oct 2007 - Some comments on masterview

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview

[Masterview-users] Some comments on masterview