usability redesign for the allison template

November 8, 2007 By in Uncategorized 9 Comments

I merged my private branch of the Allison template. It’s not pink anymore, and is much more usable:

Install it as a gem:

$ sudo gem install allison

It includes a handy command-line helper allison, which you can read about in Allison’s own RDoc. The RDoc is self-hosted. Self-hosting is in. Pink is out.

9 responses

  1. I’ve been using a local copy of allison 2.3 for a while now and I love it. Unfortunately, I’m on windows and this new gem version doesn’t play nice with Windows. Here’s the diff for my fix, but I can’t verify this on a *nix box:

    Index: allison.rb ===============

    —–allison.rb (revision 1101)

    <ins>+</ins> allison.rb (working copy)

    @–32,7 +32,7 @

    # Markaby page says Markaby is better in its own module

    module Allison

    – PROJECT = `pwd`.split(“/”).reverse.detect {|dir| dir !~ /trunk/ }

    + PROJECT = Dir.pwd.split(“/”).reverse.detect {|dir| dir !~ /trunk/ }

    FONTS = METHODLIST = SRCPAGE = FILEPAGE = CLASSPAGE = “”

  2. That PROJECT business isn’t even used; it’s left over mistakenly from my local version.

    Thanks for the report; I’ll release a fix.

  3. I generated documentation for Rails. But the doc is so slow, because there are:

    Files: 315 Classes: 463

    Modules: 544

    Methods: 2324

    The JS is not so functional, either.

  5. Thanks for all the effort put into making this available—and giving it away. :)

    I’m slowly moving Allison to be my rdoc template. Do you have any tips on how to comment attributes and constants?

  6. From rdoc-style.css:

    /*;
Allison template;
Copyright 2007 Cloudburst LLC, all rights reserved;
Redistribution or modification prohibited;
*/;

    Should I believe this, or the LICENSE file?

    The template looks great, otherwise I wouldn’t be concerned about its license.

  7. Mark: No, I don’t support that right now. You would have to write a little patch for Allison.

    Phil: Ah, yeah, that is a mistake. I’ll release a fix right away.

  8. The Allison template looks fantastic! Such a breath of fresh air!

    However, when using the Allison gem on Windows (Ruby 1.8.6-p111), it seems to do nothing.

    For example:

    allison -U lib\*.rb

    Returns immediately. No error message, nothing… Any ideas?

  9. I am on windows and also found the allison program to be hit-and-miss. Running rdoc and referencing the allison template worked 100% of the time.

    I set up an environment variable ‘template’ as suggested and found that it worked with all rails ‘doc’ commands except ‘rake doc:plugins’. For this command, ‘-T html’ is hardcoded (rails 2.0.2). The fix was to edit the rakefile (documentation.rake under the rails gem directory) to pick up the environment variable.

    This site (http://coderepos.org/share/wiki/Resh) shows how to configure your .gemrc file in order to use the allison template for the rdoc of your local gems.

    The allison template is a big improvement – thanks!!!