I love the move towards building and supporting Blueprint using Ruby. It would be great if we could overlay the ability to build a ruby gem for Blueprint. Doing so would allow for things like:

• Install BP Gem
• Keep the gem up to date using standard ruby gem versioning
• Run a 'rake' command from inside the RAILS ROOT of any rails app to install BP CSS. Running it after a new version of the gem is installed would keep it up to date.

This would still allow of course non-rails users to still download and install BP the traditional way (I think it would remain unchanged, there would just be additional code in the source dir to specify the gem config).

Dr. Nic's NewGem tool is great for getting this setup relatively easily.

http://newgem.rubyforge.org/

Ideally, the BP CSS files, Test Files, and docs could be built from Ruby source. You might investigate SASS which is part of the HAML templating system. If you did this, it would also allow having a ruby generator bundled as part of the gem. The generator would let you specify the num columns, etc for a custom BP install.

http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/rdoc/classes/Sass.html

Glenn,

The upcoming BP 0.7 will handle these suggestions. Although it won't be distributed as a gem, this provides similar functionality to not only RoR developers developers using other languages. My write-up is located here: http://jdclayton.com/blueprints_compress_a_walkthrough.html

I think the changes sound great. My primary motivation for the suggestion of gem'ifying was to gain the versioning capabilities of gems. I suppose though that you can achieve the same effect by checking out the repository and updating periodically.

With my rails bias it would be nice to have this installed as a gem or plugin though, which would allow me to bundle and version the 'generator' and its config file with my application code. I would gain the benfefit of knowing exactly how my config looked at any point in the version history of the app. Would have to take a look that the plugin layout is still compatible with the friendly layout that non-rails users have today. Just a thought for you to chew on.

Thanks for the hard work.

Report copied to http://blueprintcss.lighthouseapp.com/projects/15318-blueprint-css/tickets/4-make-bp-a-ruby-gem

Closing.