= Styles 'n Scripts Extension

The Styles 'n Scripts extension was an extension requested by John Long as a means of separating javascripts & stylesheets from other site content stored in pages.

== CONTENTS In this README you'll find:

1. Usage
2. Why Change Things?
3. Installation
4. To Do

== USAGE Using this extension is rather painless. If you can use the rest of Radiant, using these additions should feel obvious. There are a couple of things to take note of, however.

• The CSS and JS tabs are where you create, edit, and delete stylesheets and javascripts. But you need Administrator or Developer permissions to see these tabs.

• If you want to reference or otherwise use your script or stylesheet in one of your pages, there are and tags. These tags can be used to inject your CSS or JS code into the page or just render a link to the file itself. (Click the 'available tags' link when editing your Page to learn more about these two tags and their options).

• If you really want to get fancy with your CSS and JS files, you can also use the corresponding or to reference other files of the same type. So now you can create a single CSS or JS file that is made up of sub-files to cut down on server requests and speed up page load time -- viola, now Radiant offers asset packaging just like Rails! (And the caching mechanism is smart enough to keep track of your file's dependencies)

• There are 4 settings that can be changed via Rake "config" task (see Rake -T for usage):

  • stylesheet_directory
  • javascript_directory
  • stylesheet_mime_type
  • javascript_mime_type

That's it. Everything else is either too obvious to bother with here or automagical and/or too top secret to disclose ;-).

== WHY CHANGE THINGS? As John sees it, the pages tab is for storing your main content. (Think of the tree view as the list of available destinations for your users. Sure, they need stylesheets and javascripts, but those are supporting files -- much like images -- that augment your pages).

There are a number of interesting benefits gained by this approach:

• CSS and JS files now get designer-level permissions -- not user-level.

• These files are now cached differently. Rather than the 5-minute expiration on pages, these files can now report to the browser the true LAST-MODIFIED date so we don't have to serve up these files constantly. We can put the user's browser caching to work.

• This properly separates the concerns of Pages and Text Assets. (I mean, do javascripts really need a layout or stylesheets a breadcrumb?). Easier to understand for the user and easier to develop for.

• Allows extensions to better interact with pages. For example, a search extension can now safely parse all the pages without search terms like: "background" returning all your stylesheets.

• Declutter the pages tree view so that it only shows what your clients care about -- the things they'd aim their browser at (see John's point above).

• This opens the door for validation, minification and obfuscation of scripts and stylesheets (I'm thinking that these features belong in their own extension(s) but they're much easier to build now that CSS and JS distinct objects).

== INSTALLATION

1. Copy this extension into your existing Radiant project (place it at: [your project location]/vendor/extensions/sns

2. Incorporate the database migrations into your existing database using: rake db:migrate:extensions

   Or, if you prefer to be more specific to this extension: rake radiant:extensions:styles_n_scripts:migrate

3. Copy the needed images into Radiant's /public/images directory using: rake radiant:extensions:styles_n_scripts:update

4. (Optional) Configure your stylesheet and javascript directories. By default The Styles 'n Scripts serves your stylesheets and javascripts out of the /css and /js folders respectively. You can change these locations via the "config" rake task: rake radiant:extensions:styles_n_scripts:config

5. (Optional) Configure your stylesheet and javascript content (MIME) types. Again, you use the Rake "config" task.

6. (Optional) Set a different location for the cache directory. This is set in The styles_n_scripts_extension.rb file using TEXT_ASSET_CACHE_DIR

== TO-DO Figure out what the core team needs to get this puppy baked into Radiant!

Add a mechanism to eliminate (or at least reduce) the possibility of circular references with or tags.

Improve the file uploading: Do we need to confirm that it's a text file? Do we need to mess with handling different text encoding? Do we want to allow multiple file uploads?