RubyFrontier 0.9.9.2

RubyFrontier 0.9.9.2 is considered as a helpful and smart tool that imitates UserLand Frontier yet is written in Ruby to support users with a reliable way of maintaining and generating Web sites.

It presently uses TextMate (a superb writing / programming tool, and very nimble when dealing with a big hierarchy of files). In a sense that means RubyFrontier is Mac-only, though there isn’t any a priori reason for this (since Ruby is platform-agnostic).

It’s not a GUI tool and it’s not for non-programmers (it’s about using Ruby to make the fancy stuff happen in the Web site, such as navigation bars and such). 

Major Features:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Rapid writing. Since form and links take care of themselves, the time is spent writing, creating and editing content.
4. 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:
   • 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 
   • 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!