Inspired by Sinatra's simplicity and ease of use, Frank lets you build static sites using your favorite libs. Frank has a built in development server for previewing work as you develop. Frank also has a "dump" command for compiling and saving your work out to static html and css.
Frank uses Tilt, so it comes with support for Haml & Sass, LESS, Builder, ERB, Liquid, and Mustache.
Create a new project with:
$ frank <project_name>
Then cd <project_name> and start up the server with:
$ frankup
-----------------------
Frank's holdin' it down...
0.0.0.0:3601
And you're ready to get to work. By default, dynamic templates are served from the dynamic folder,
static files are served from the static folder, and layouts are served from the layouts folder.
When you're done working:
$ frankout <dump_dir>
to compile templates and copy them--along with static your assets--into <dump_dir>. Or,
$ frankout --production <dump_dir>
to compile & copy over, but organized to work as a static website in production. (e.g. folders named after your views, with an index.html inside)
All of your templates, less, sass &c. go into <project>/dynamic by default.
You can organize them into subfolders if you've got lots.
Writing views is simple. Say you've got a blog.haml in <project>/dynamic; just browse over to
http://0.0.0.0:3601/blog and your view will be parsed and served up as html.
Frank was designed to make controllers unnecessary. But, sometimes it's nice to have variables in your templates / layouts. This is particularly handy if you want to set the page title (in the layout) according to the view. This is simple, now, with meta data.
Meta fields go at the top of any view, and are written in YAML. To mark the end
of the meta section, place the meta delimeter, META---, on a blank line. You can
use as many hyphens as you'd like (as long as there are 3).
Meta fields are then available as local variables to all templating languages that support them--in the view & layout:
view:
title: My Rad Page
author: My Rad Self
---------------------------------------------META
%h1= title
%h3= 'By ' + author
layout:
%title= title + '--My Rad Site'
Layouts are also simple with Frank. Create a default.haml (or .rhtml, etc.),
in the layouts folder, and include a yield somewhere therein; views using the
layout will be inserted there.
You can namespace your layouts using folders:
- When rendering a view--
dynamic_folder/blog/a-blog-post.haml, - Frank would first look for the layout
layouts/blog/default.haml, - and if not found use fall back on
layouts/default.haml
Frank also supports choosing layouts on a view-by-view basis via meta data. Just add a
layout meta field:
layout: my_layout.haml
---------------------------------------------META
%h1 I'm using my_layout.haml instead of default.haml!
or if you don't want a layout at all:
layout: nil
---------------------------------------------META
%h1 No layout here!
Frank comes with a helper method, render_partial, for including partials
in your views.
You can also add your own helper methods easily.
To create a partial, make a new file like any of your other views, but prefix its name with an underscore.
For example, if I have a partial named _footer.haml, I can include this
in my Haml views like this:
= render_partial 'footer'
You can also send local variables to partials like this:
= render_partial 'footer', :local_variable_name => 'some_value'
Helper methods are also easy. Just open up helpers.rb and add your methods
to the FrankHelpers module; that's it. Use them just like render_partial.
Frank now has a handy automatic page refreshing helper. Just include = refresh
(or equivalent) in your view, and Frank will automatically refresh the page for you whenever you
save a project file. This eliminates the tedium of hundreds of manual refreshes over the course
of building a project.
When it's time to frankout, Frank will leave out the JavasScript bits of the refresher.
Frank now has a current_path variable that you can use to set selected states on nav items.
It will return the path info from the template being processed. You also, have access to the variable from layouts and from the frankout command.
You can easily generate dummy text like so:
%p= lorem.sentences 3
This will return 3 sentences of standard Lorem Ipsum. lorem also has all of the following methods for generating dummy text:
lorem.sentence # returns a single sentence
lorem.words 5 # returns 5 individual words
lorem.word
lorem.paragraphs 10
lorem.paragraph
lorem.date # accepts a strftime format argument
lorem.name
lorem.first_name
lorem.last_name
lorem.email
Likewise, Frank can generate placeholder images for you, from a selection of 10 pre-made images. For example, to generate <img /> tag with a random dummy image:
%img{:src=> lorem.image( 500, 400 ) }
The lorem.image helper returns a special Frank image URL. In this case, the returned image will be 500 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall. By default, Frank caches the images returned for each specific size. So every subsequent request for a 500x400 image will return the same thing. If you'd rather have a random image every time, just pass in true for the 3rd image:
lorem.image( 100, 100, true ) # returns a random 100x100 image every time it's called
( NOTE: Unfortunately, in order to use the placeholder images, you must have a working ImageMagick, and have the mini_magick gem installed as well. )
If you would like to use the placeholder images in a context where the helper methods are unavailable (e.g. in static CSS or JavaScript), you can access the URL directly with /_img/500x400.jpg, or for random images /_img/500x400.jpg?random.
All of the lorem helpers accept an optional "replacement" argument. This will be the text rendered when you frankout.
For example lorem.sentence("<%= page.content %>") will generate a lorem sentence when you view the page using the frankup server.
However, when you frankout the template will render "<%= page.content %>". This is useful if you plan on moving a frank project
into a framework. (e.g. rails, sinatra, django, etc)
In settings.yml, you can change your folder names, and server port & host name.
Check the comments there if you need help.
(NOTE: In order to reduce confusion, Frank no longer checks for a ~/.frank folder to copy when you run the frank command. Instead, the preferred method is just to create a base Frank project wherever you please, and just cp -r to the location of your new project, since this is all the frank command did anyway)
$ gem install frank