Styleguide

The Styleguide gem is intended to provide a living internal styleguide to any application with default guidelines which are easily customizable within the application. It offers KSS support for stylesheet parsing as well as support for Markdown templates (for md, mdown, and markdown file extensions) and the :markdown Haml filter. Additionally, it implements Pygments.rb syntax highlighting for colorizing code blocks.

Installation

Styleguide is distributed as a gem, which is how it should be used in your app.

Include the gem in your Gemfile:

gem "styleguide", "~> 0.0", :git => "[email protected]/doom-squad/styleguide.git"

Quick Start

Styleguide is written as a mountable Rails engine and comes preconfigured with its own routes. To mount the engine in your application's config/routes.rb:

mount Styleguide::Engine, at: 'styleguide', as: 'styleguide'

Usage

Styleguide content is broken down by two categories: section and reference. The section is used to separate content by language or platform (e.g. Ruby, CSS, Javascript, etc.) while the reference is used to organize content within a particular section (e.g. Constants, Strings, Regular Expresions, etc.). Generally, references are numeric and resemble a semantic version number such as 1.0. However, a reference can actually be anything matching /(\d+\.\d+)|(\w+)/.

All styleguide requests are routed through a single controller and action, namely 'sections#show'. By default, the show template will render three files: a sections menu partial, a references menu partial, and a template located at styleguide/'#{styleguide_section}/#{styleguide_reference}' that contains content for the selected section and reference.

For example, a request to http://example.com/styleguide/ruby/1.0 would look for a partial with the path styleguide/sections/ruby/1.0.html.erb. The template extension can obviously be anything supported by your application, including md, mdown, and markdown which is supported through this gem.

Helpers

Styleguide comes with several helpers to aid in authoring your guideline content:

• styleguide_section - Contains the currently requested section.
• styleguide_reference - Contains the currently requested reference.
• markdown - Renders a markdown string into HTML.
• highlight_syntax - Renders a string into Pygments styleable HTML. The second argument can supply the lexer.
• styleguide_link_to - Both :section and :reference can be passed in the second argument. A class of selected will be added to the link if it points to the current section or reference (within the current section).
• kss_block - Create a stylesheet example block containing description, modifiers, live examples, and example HTML.

Sections

Because routes are rendered dynamically, any section/reference that has a matching template will be rendered. However, the engine comes with a default sections menu that has 5 built-in sections: Overview, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, and Mobile.

To override this default sections menu, create a partial with the path styleguide/shared/_sections.html.erb. If you're using the default styles, the partial should have a ul containing the section links nested under nav.sections.

A section link can easily be generated with the Styleguide::SectionsHelper:

styleguide_link_to 'CSS', section: 'css'

See the default sections menu for more clarification.

References

To provide a references menu for a given section, create a partial with the path styleguide/#{styleguide_section}/_references.html.erb. If you're using the default styles, the partial should have a ul containing the references links nested under nav.references.

A reference link can easily be generated with the Styleguide::SectionsHelper:

styleguide_link_to 'Buttons', reference: 1.0

See the default ruby references menu for more clarification.

KSS

KSS is a gem written by GitHub meant to provide a method of writing maintainable documentation similar to TomDoc. To read more about how to use KSS, please read their documentation.

Configuration

To setup KSS to parse your application's stylesheets, you will need to create an initializer and set up the stylesheet_paths variable. This variable is an array similar to config.assets.load_paths and can contain multiple stylesheet path strings. Each path in the array will be parsed by KSS.

Add the following to config/initializers/styleguide.rb and configure as needed:

Styleguide.setup do |config|
  config.stylesheet_paths << File.expand_path('app/assets/stylesheets', Rails.root)
end

References

KSS references should be organized in a numerical hierarchy similar to semantic versioning. Additionally, a third number may be used for even more precision.

For example, if Buttons are designated as section 1.0, then the default buttons may be 1.1, mini-buttons 1.2, and mini-buttons with icons 1.2.1.

See the GitHub styleguide for an example hierarchy.

Usage

Once stylesheets have been documented with KSS comment blocks, examples can be created using the KSS::Parser and kss_block helper method. The kss_block helper method takes one argument for the section (e.g. '1.1' or '1.2.1') and a ruby block containing example HTML. Within the example HTML, all occurrences of $modifier_class will be replaced with the modifier class when generating live examples.

For example,

// Typical button element setup with class `btn`.
//
// .lite - Light colored button.
// .go - A "go" button.
// .archive - Use when element has been archived.
//
// Styleguide 1.1

<%= kss_block('1.1') do %>
  <a class="btn $modifier_class" href="#">Click Here</a>
<% end %>

will create an example block containing the description (with Markdown), a list of modifiers and their descriptions, live example of the base button, live examples for each of the modifying classes, and a syntax-highlighted block containing the example HTML.

To override the default kss block HTML, create a view with the path styleguide/shared/_kss_block.html.erb.

See the default kss partial for more clarification.

Overrides

The Styleguide gem comes with a collection of default guidelines for CSS, JavaScript, and Ruby. Any of these can be overridden by creating a template with the same path as the template in the gem (including the _references partials).

Controller

There may be a case where you need to override one of the default controllers - perhaps to use a custom layout or mount the styleguide behind your application's authentication mechanisms. To do so, you will need to create a controller with the same name and path as the controller you are overriding.

You will also need to bring in the Engine.helpers unless you are overriding all of the views as well and do not plan on using any of the helper methods.

For example, to override the Styleguide::SectionsController, you would create a file with the path of styleguide/sections_controller.rb.

class Styleguide::SectionsController < ::ApplicationController
  helper Styleguide::Engine.helpers
end

Similarly, if you had another ApplicationController containing your authentication logic, you could simply extend that class instead to hide the styleguide behind your authentication structure.

class Styleguide::SectionsController < ::Admin::ApplicationController
  helper Styleguide::Engine.helpers
end

Layout

There are a couple of ways to override the built-in layout. If you simply wanted to override the default layout completely, you could just create a new layout with a path of layouts/styleguide/application.html.erb. Note: be sure to include a stylesheet link to styleguide/application if you want to use the default styles.

However, if you wanted to extend the layout, you will need to first override a controller and set the layout to your new layout template.

class Styleguide::SectionsController < ::ApplicationController
  helper Styleguide::Engine.helpers
  layout 'styleguide'
end

When extending a layout, you can make use of the built-in content_for sections that are in the default layout: stylesheets, header, footer, and javascripts.

For example, to add in your own stylesheet to the default layout, you could add a stylesheet_link_tag to the stylesheets section then simply render the default layout.

<% content_for :stylesheets do %>
  <%= stylesheet_link_tag "application", media: "screen" %>
<% end %>

<%= render template: 'layouts/styleguide/application' %>

The header and footer sections are directly above and below the rendered view template respectively.

Styles

By default, each styleguide page is wrapped with an <article class="styleguide"> that also contains the styleguide_section and styleguide_reference in the classname. This can be used to add specific styles to certain sections or pages.

For example, the styleguide overview page has custom styles to display a large image and headline text welcoming the user. This was achieved by adding styles to .styleguide.overview.index.