Work with HTML coder - html

I am a rails backend developer and I am now working in a team with an HTML coder and I have some problems with information exchange.
I want him to generate all the HTML templates (haml, erb, whatever) and css files. But he has actually no clue on how to install ruby (and rails).
So, we are working now in this ugly workcycle when he puts all html's and css's in public, test them, and then I (myself) move them to correct place.
Is there a tool (for HTML codes) that mimics Rails rendering part so he will run this tool, which must be easy, and when the server starts, he can put all the templates to app/ and test them?
I see this as a small easy installable subset of rails, that only deal with page rendering.

If your coder still doesn't know how to install ruby or how to configure stuff for works , then I can say this is quite problematic . You either can try any cloud based IDE . Or , tools like git to get only raw stuff.
But , you also can look for someone who in minimum way will try to make the whole process possible by learning and installing ruby in their pc .

I had a similiar problem where a copywriter needed to play with the html and we ended up using Cloud9.
Cloud9 is a collaborative IDE in the cloud, IMHO It's pretty decent for small scale projects and can really get the job done.
I simply installed rails once and ran a local dev server and she did all the modifications and watced the preview.
Another option is to create a vagrant environment and preisntall rails there. This means the HTML coder would have to install a VM on his machine and run the vagrant there.

Related

How to work with gulp via FTP?

First of all, I'm sorry if this is pretty stupid question for you, I was searching the web for the answer, but unfortunately couldn't find complex one.
Recently I discovered not so new, but still cool stuff like SCSS, Pug, LiveReload, Gulp and all that automation stuff. I was really blown away, cause I've been like in a cave for past 2-3 years. So, the development for me is pretty easy and fast now, but I've got problem with production of this.
So, for example, I have to develop WordPress site. One year ago, I'd just run local server, install WordPress there, then I create a new template and customize it for customer needs. After that, I'd upload all of that on web-server (for FTP stuff I use Filezilla, if there's better tools - point me, please) and than, if needed, I'd open desired files from "Edit" menu in Filezilla, customize them, save - and that it's done, I can see the result in browser. I don't need local copy of the web-site on my computer (since some web-sites nowadays are pretty 'heavy').
Now, I don't know what to do with that automation stuff, cause it's all running with console and has to be compiled. So, in order to develop complex CMS-driven web-sites using automation tools, I need to always have latest copy on my local machine, and that send it again on web-server? What if customer, for example, decides to change the article or something on the web-site, when I sync my local copy with web-server, it'll be lost.
So, my main question, is there a way for me to create WordPress website using Gulp & Co and then easily update it later, via FTP client?

Going from webpage to website

I have been coding html/css for some time now, and I've gotten to be proficient at coding single webpages, but I can't figure out how to code a website. Some questions I have are:
Do I need to buy a domain if I want to build a website (for practice)
Are their special things I need to know (such as special tags) that I wouldn't have learned from coding just a single page?
Should I learn how to use a grid if I am coding multiple pages?
You may want to first decide what kind of back end you want (the server side code that builds and delivers the pages) I strongly recommend rails, and a react.rb.
You do not need a domain name.
A great way to start is to use a service like cloud9 which is free, and will get you going in no time. Cloud9 will do a one button setup of a rails environment and get you going.
Another approach is to begin using react.rb and just expand your skill set from the front end towards the server. The react.rb tutorial creates a simple chat application and you can do this all with the tools your already have. Once you have mastered that you can set up a simple rails server and start adding server side persistance (saving data on the server.) This is the approach I recommend, but full discloure: I am one of the leads on the react.rb project so I am very biased.
Well, you can build simple to wonderful STATIC websites from HTML/CSS but if you are talking about some serious web development then you will need to learn a server side scripting language. Most of the websites these days are database driven serverside webpages. There are many serverside programming languages and tutorials for the same out there.
I suggest you start with PHP (for scripting language) and MySql (for database)
Again, the choice of language is totally upto you.
Then you would need to learn about setting up a server on your local computer. For this you will need to learn about (x)-AMP. This would be WAMP, XAMP, MAMP depending on what OS you are using.
If you are only needing to develop a simple CMS website, then there are alot of CMS framework which you can go for, which will not require much of coding.
It seems as if you are looking to connect multiple pages to the same website, so you can navigate between pages. And it seems that you want to practice with local files. If that is the case, you need to first create a local folder for your website and use the a tag in your html files. Inside the a tag, you will need to include an href with the url to your other page. A link to another html page that is saved in the same folder as your original will look like this:
New Page
You will want to use external CSS and JavaScript files to keep all of your pages in the same format.
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_links.asp
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_link.asp

IDE for web project working with distant copy

We currently have an intranet host on a server (just Html and js project).
contributors do not have a local copy of the project, and modify the code on a regular basis using Expression web. However, a lot of Expression web's features, like link maintenance, do not work if the project is not on a local cache.
Do you know any good web IDE capable of maintaining a web project directly on a server ?
Thanks
This IDE may work for you it is biased in the cloud.
https://c9.io/

WIX InstallUtil/InstallUtilLib and Configuration File Deployment why is InstallUtil bad?

I often find the quote "InstallUtil.exe" is an ugly pattern or "Don't use InstallUtil.exe" and that I should use native WIX or Installation package patterns and I still don't understood why.
I stepped away from using InstallUtil to install a .NET service as I finally learnt that writing registry keys for such an action should be an un-install-able action - and I've come to terms with this as correct.
As I've been working through my WIX installer for a relatively complex product, I have found myself in need of creating or updating SQL Server databases, creating or updating IIS Applications and finally updating or creating configuration files.
Each of my components (features) are optional, but they all share the same configuration file. As my product uses unity, its important to note that this library contains strong support for reading/updating/removing components from the Unity Configuration block, therefore it seems fairly smart to me that I should take advantages of these blocks via Installation Components (i.e. InstallUtil) to create or update my configuration file at installation time.
Just to be clear here, my installer does not natively contain a configuration file for my application: at installation time, the installer has no idea as to the shape of it as its based on the features selected. Surely I should be embedding this knowledge into each of the modules that are to be deployed and not in the remit of the installer which is now a completely independent project? Wouldn't this break O-O principals even if we are talking about installation?
I'd really appreciate some guidance as to whether this is good practise or not? Am I reading 'InstallUtil' is bad for installing services, or is it that using 'InstallUtil' is bad full-stop? If so, what are my options for smart updating of configuration files?
The main reason for avoiding InstallUtil is that it runs outside of the installation transaction, so Windows Installer cannot keep track of what it's done.
I have used InstallUtil on a few occasions, when I just couldn't get Wix to do what I needed and didn't have time to write a custom action. In this case I called the InstallUtilLib version as I feel this is a cleaner approach.
I used the this blog as a guide as to how to achieve this.

Support for live preview of Haml in Coda or Espresso?

I just discovered the beautiful Haml and Sass, and want to develop in these languages but with live previews. Coda and Espresso both allow for beautiful live previews of HTML files, but previews of an Haml file simply show it as plain text.
While there exist sugars for Espresso that add syntax highlighting, which is nice, I would like something that automatically compiles Haml files to HTML, and then lets me preview that instead of Haml.
Does anything like this exist for either Coda, or Espresso, or for any other web development tool out there?
(If it makes a difference, I'm not developing for Ruby on Rails, I'm making a static website, so the Ruby on Rails plugin shouldn't help AFAIK.
Software I tried out were StaticMatic and Middleman. StaticMatic's development seems discontinued, and for some reason MiddleMan refuses to work after creating my initial directory structure. Maybe I'm using it wrong.)
I don't use Espresso, so no comment there. However, Coda does not provide any support for Haml or Sass that I can find. I've been closely following the Coda forums, as I am a paid user, and it looks as though a 2.0 version is forthcoming. Who knows, perhaps that'll be included.
For now, since you're not using Ruby on Rails, I might suggest TextMate. It doesn't do Haml or Sass "right out of the box", but it can be configured to do so using "Bundles."
Installing HAML bundle for TextMate is a primer on how to setup TextMate for Haml/Sass, and I suspect there are others.
That said, for roughly the cost of TextMate you can purchase RubyMine ($69), which does both Haml (via RubyGem) and Sass (via Plugin), and can also handle running Sass --watch internally. I know you're not using Ruby, so maybe the idea of using a tool made primarily for Ruby doesn't appeal, but it does work in both the Haml and Sass environments very nicely.
The third option would be BBEdit, which can also handle both Haml and Sass. Some information on the plugin for BBEdit is in BBEdit-Codeless-Language-Module-for-HAML-SASS.
I hope this helps.
P.S.: I'm a paid user on all the platforms I mentioned. While I use RubyMine as my primary tool, I find that TextMate still gets a lot of use when I'm programming and need a quick, friendly window to examine code in. I used to use BBEdit when I needed to do complex regular expression-style search and replacements, but then I discovered how to do the same thing in TextMate, so BBEdit is sort of collecting dust. Coda? It looks pretty, but doesn't get the job done so much any more (though Panic's Transmit is still very much a core application).
There are two plugins for Coda 2 that I am aware of:
Coda-Sass-Plug-in is available from GitHub and allows you to save out your scss files to css. I worked for me though I wasn't completely happy with needing to refresh multiple tabs all the time.
LessCSS is available from incident57 dot com. Although I was never able to make it work, it lead me to CodeKit (CodeKit has been mothballed due to production of CodeKit).
CodeKit has the ability to watch folders and generate css files from sass or less when they are saved. It also has the ability to handle Stylus, Haml, Javascript, CoffeeScript, Jade, Slim and Kit.
OK, for anyone else looking for an answer to this, I decided to go along with a different solution. I'm using my normal editors, along with 'serve', a Ruby gem that runs a web server using WEBrick, and automatically compiles any files which it detects has changed. This includes HAML, Sass, Slim, Markdown, etc. files. I'm going to be using either Coda's live preview, or the minimalist browser called Playground, which eliminates the need to press refresh when the local file it is displaying changes.
This workflow is nice for now, although it doesn't have any built-in method to build the entire site into a static site when I'm done and want to deploy. This is a feature in middleman, but middleman still refuses to run because a dependency of it, thin, refuses to work on 64 bits. I might have to manually compile all the files using the terminal command, and hope the Haml interpreter can handle combining template files with each file, which I seriously doubt at this stage. This limitation and thus the continued dependence on 'serve' might force me to consider one of the other applications out there, listed on the page Haml Sucks for Content.