Discontinued¶ ↑

I decided to discontinue the development of this library to concentrate my efforts on other projects.

Some of the helpers available in this library have been included in Rails itself or are no longer applicable against the Rails 3 and 4 releases. If you are interested in some specific helper, just copy and paste the code in your app.

Now back to your original README content…

Helperful¶ ↑

Helperful aims to be a collection of useful and reusable Rails helpers.

Requirements¶ ↑

Ruby >= 1.8.6
Rails >= 2.2.x (tested up to Rails 2.3.3)

Plugin Installation¶ ↑

As a Gem¶ ↑

This is the preferred way to install Helperful and the best way if you want install a stable version. The GEM is hosted on Gemcutter.

$ gem install helperful --source http://gemcutter.org

With Rails >= 2.2, you can specify the GEM dependency in your environment.rb file so that Rails will automatically check the requirement on startup.

Rails::Initializer.run do |config|

  # other configurations
  # ...

  config.gem "helperful", :source => "http://gemcutter.org"

end

As a Plugin¶ ↑

This is the preferred way if you want to live on the edge and install a development version.

$ script/plugin install git://github.com/weppos/helperful.git

Getting Started¶ ↑

Helper methods are grouped into different files according to their scope.

Before using an helper method you should include the helper file in your Rails application, as you would expected to do for a standard Rails helper. All helpers belongs to the Helperful namespace to prevent conflicts with default Rails helpers. Don’t forget to add the namespace when including an helper from your controller.

class MyController < ApplicationController

  # include the title_helper
  helper 'helperful/title'

  # include the title_helper passing the qualified the module name
  helper Helperful::TitleHelper

end

Moreover, the Helperful library provides a helpful method called helperful. It aliases the standard Rails ActionController::Base#helper method with the exception that it automatically prepends the helperful namespace when necessary.

class MyController < ApplicationController

  # include the title_helper
  helperful :title

  # include the title_helper passing the qualified the module name
  helperful Helperful::TitleHelper

end

The following lines are equivalent:

helper    'helperful/title'
helper    :'helperful/title'
helper    Helperful::TitleHelper
helperful 'title'
helperful :title
helperful Helperful::TitleHelper

The helperful methods accepts any parameter accepted by the original helper method.

helper    'helperful/title', 'helperful/affiliations'
helperful :title, :affiliations

See the Rails documentation for ActionController::Base#helper method for more details about how to include an helper into a Rails application.

Once included, all helper methods are available in the View.

<html>
  <title><%= title 'This is a title' %></title>
  <body>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

Helpers¶ ↑

This is a short description of all available helpers. Please refer to the documentation available at the beginning of any helper file for further details.

Asset Tag Helper¶ ↑

Provides a set of helpers for generating HTML that links views to assets such as images, javascripts, stylesheets, and feeds.

Affiliations Helper¶ ↑

Provides a set of helpers for working with online affiliations.

The tradedoubler_verification_tag helper method returns the site verification tag required by Tradedoubler to verify the publisher account ownership.

# In your template
<html>
  <head>
    <%= tradedoubler_verification_tag('00112233') %>
  </head>
  <body>
    This is your page content.
  </body>
</html>

# Will produce the following output.
<html>
  <head>
    <%= tradedoubler_verification_tag('00112233') %>
  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- TradeDoubler site verification 00112233 -->
  </body>
</html>

Content Helper¶ ↑

Provides a set of helpers for capturing and working with your page content in a more effective way.

The has_content? helper is a natural fulfillment for the original content_for helper.

<% content_for :foo do %>
  <div>This is a foo content.</div>
<% end %>

<% has_content? :foo  # => true %>
<% has_content? "foo" # => true %>

Javascript Helper¶ ↑

Provides a set of helpers for working with JavaScript in your views.

The javascript_content_for helper combines the features of content_for and javascript_tag into a single helper.

<% javascript_content_for :head do %>
  $("#id").hide();
<% end %>

The code above looks like much more readable than the following one. Isn’t it?

<% javascript_content_for :head do; javascript_tag do %>
  $("#id").hide();
<% end; end %>

Title Helper¶ ↑

Provides an helper for managing page title in Rails views and layouts.

# Include the helper in your controller.
# You might want to include it in ApplicationController to make it available
# always and everywhere in your templates.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  helperful :title
end

# Now you can use set a title in your action
# Example. index.html.rb
<h1><%= title 'This is a title' %></h1>

# And print the title with a :site decorator in your layout.
<html>
  <head>
    <title><%= title :site => 'My Cool Site!' %></title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <%= yield %>
  </body>
</html>

rkhater/helperful