Should Nesta be a gem?

I just posted this question to the Nesta mailing list. For those of you who aren't on the list, here's the message in full:

I'm considering a fairly significant change to the way files are organised in Nesta, in order to convert it into a gem.

When I started Nesta I wanted to be able to make a web site by cloning the repo, making the relevant changes to the code, and then putting it live. It was low on ceremony, and a gem didn't feel appropriate.

As more people started to use it, that approach made me feel a bit guilty. Whenever I changed the default templates in ./views I was potentially causing merge conflicts for people who had just changed a few simple things in their layout. So I created the ./local folder where you can put your own changes and you'll no longer run into merge commits.

Then along came themes.

Now there are three views folders where you can find a template, and up to three different app.rb files where you can add your code. It's perfectly logical, but it's not simple.

So here's what I'm thinking.

  1. Rather than clone nesta, you install a gem.
  2. Rather than putting your templates in ./local/views, you use ./views.
  3. The only thing that Nesta requires to run is a content directory.

Making a new site would look something like this:

$ gem install nesta
$ nesta mysite.com
$ cd mysite.com
$ ls
config.ru    content/
$ mr-sparkle config.ru

And away you go...

If you want to use a theme, you'd do this:

$ nesta theme install https://github.com/gma/nesta-theme-original.git

If you want to override the behaviour of some of the code, you'd create an app.rb file and hack away. If you want to change the templates, create ./views and drop some files in it.

In other words, the root of your project would become the new local, and local would go away.

There are other potential benefits from converting it to a gem (e.g. it'd be easier to get it mounted inside Rails), but in the context of how most people currently use Nesta, I think the above just about covers it.

What do you think? Would this screw you up? Can you see it causing you a problem?

Cheers,
Graham

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