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chronick / middleman-bower-template

A middleman template that uses bower for asset management, and a few other defaults I found useful.
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I'm curious about the use of bower #1

Closed renatocarvalho closed 11 years ago

renatocarvalho commented 11 years ago

Hi there, I'm building my middleman template and I found yours pretty cool. I'm curious about why you are using bower instead gems.

Cheers

chronick commented 11 years ago

Hi, and thanks! I put quite a bit of work into this one, and I have quite a bit of more work planned for it, since its my primary method of making sites for my customers ( at least those who don't need a CMS ). My workflow involves using a lot of little single-purpose jquery plugins as well as more established asset packages like bootstrap. Most of the bigger ones exist in some form as a gem, but the same cannot necessarily be said for that cool jquery slider plugin you found the other day and want to use. There's nothing stopping them from becoming gems, except that its much easier to publish a package to bower, since there's really no packaging standards there (which works for and against them, IMO). I have tried schemes before where I import jquery and bootstrap with the gem and do the other gem-less plugins with bower, but that feels messy, so I feel like my use case necessitates two seperate package managers, one for "server-side" (as much as that applies to middleman) ruby, and one for client-side assets.

I'd say if you know you'll be sticking with big-name libraries that have gems, then gems are the way to go, since this scheme I have of symlinking the assets to the components directory, while the best solution I could come up with given the circumstances, is nowhere close to ideal.

So if you come up with a better method, seriously please let me know. One idea I had was to allow passing in custom asset paths to the middleman-sprockets gem, which seems doable but I haven't had time to implement that yet. Thanks again for the feedback!

renatocarvalho commented 11 years ago

Hi Nick, thanks for the detailed reply. I really appreciate that.

After reading your points I think that your approach is the way to go. If I find a better solution I'll share with you indeed.

Thanks!