RudyGems

Rendering layouts that live in /public?

At work we have the following concept.

1. a “site” has a subset of our content
2. a “site” has a url - eg. “oursite.com/stickers” or “stickersNOTvicars.com”
3. a “site” can have its own customised layout, or fall back to the default one

How does this work in code?

1. site.articles (pretty simple)
2. a whole load of “route filters” that match the incoming host
3. the code I’m writing about

So, historically we did

class ApplicationController
  layout :determine_layout
  def determine_layout
    if File.exists?("#{Rails.root}/public/sites/#{@site.id}/application.rhtml")
      "../../public/sites/#{@site.id}/application"
    else
      "site_default"
    end
  end
end

This was a hack, and it breaks with Rails 2.1.1, so after a day or so playing with the internals of ActionView I discovered this;

append_view_path("#{Rails.root}/public/sites")

And it works!

We just need to set;

"#{@site.id}/application"

as our layout, and we’re away.

Site-specific layouts that live in /public!