What is RubyFrontier?

RubyFrontier is my personal writing tool for creating, editing, and maintaining Web sites. Note that it is not a “CMS”. It does not run on the server side. It’s just a writing tool that makes ordinary static pages and other objects in Web sites. Those sites then have to be uploaded to the Web in the normal way.

(Did you watch the screencast?)

RubyFrontier embodies several principles:

• Form vs. content. You write the substance of a Web page (the content). That is poured for you into a template (the form). A particular template can apply to one, several, or all of the pages in a Web site. The notion is illustrated here, where the same content is poured into several different templates.

• Ease of linkage. A link to another page within the site is easy to make, and keeps working even if you move the source page, the target page, or both.

• Rapid writing. Since form and links take care of themselves, the time is spent writing, creating and editing content.

• Total customizability. The process whereby RubyFrontier transforms Web content into a Web page gives you many opportunities to customize it. You write Ruby code to provide your own functionality. This functionality can be part of the content or part of the template (or both). Examples from my own sites:

  • Ruby code in the page’s content: A table of contents page that looks, in real time, at all the other pages in the Web site and presents itself as a hierarchical list of links to them.

  • Ruby code in the template: “Smart” navigation: a page automatically generates its own breadcrumbs links to its containing folders, previous/next links, and downward links to subtopics (as shown in the screencast).

    The navigation links at the top of these documentation pages are another example of what a “smart” navigation Ruby script might do. In fact, these documentation pages are themselves an example of the kind of thing I use RubyFrontier for!