Formtastic extension for Refinery CMS.

The purpose of this extension is to allow the use of formtastic within Refinery CMS admin views. The main user of this would be other extensions, in which case be sure to add a dependency on this gem to your extension.

In general, Refinery CMS attempts to follow a path of the most common rails way, in order to make it accessible to as many developers as possible. When building CRUD interfaces, I find that most rails developers tend to use a form builder of some sort. Although there are other excellent candidates, Formtastic appears to be the most widely used form builder, which is predominantly why it was chosen here.

The reasons for using this over the default Refinery option (of no form builder) are twofold.

Firstly, for brevity. It'll let you replace this:

<div class='field'>
  <%= f.label :latitude -%>
  <%= f.text_field :latitude  -%>
</div>

<div class='field'>
  <%= f.label :longitude -%>
  <%= f.text_field :longitude  -%>
</div>

With this:

<%= f.inputs :latitude, :longitude %>

This comes with all the usual benefits of removing duplication, such as less chance of getting the markup wrong in one specific place.

Secondly, for more object oriented field helpers. I strongly recommend creating custom field type classes for any type of custom field input (such as an image picker, map location selector, a number with currency, etc). The benefits of using a object oriented structure for this over the more functional programming style of using helpers (let alone just wacking it in the view) should be obvious.

Yes. I've tried to style the formtastic forms to look identical to Refinery defaults.

Add "refinerycms-formtastic" to your gemfile. There are no generators or migrations to run.

I've included an input type class for the Wymeditor textareas

f.input tab, :as => :wymeditor

I've added a helper to replace the huge swathe of markup needed to add the tabbed panels used in most refinery extensions (such as Pages, Blog, etc).

<%= tabbed_fieldsets f, [
  :description,
  :potential_uses,
  Refinery::Pages::Tab.new(:name => 'images', :partial => '/refinery/admin/pages/tabs/images')
] %>

It must be supplied with the form object, and an array of tabs. These tabs can be a symbol, in which case they simply display a Wymeditor field of that name, or a Refinery::Pages::Tab object, which basically just defines a name and a partial.

cd vendor/extensions/formtastic
gem build refinerycms-formtastic.gemspec
gem install refinerycms-formtastic.gem

# Sign up for a http://rubygems.org/ account and publish the gem
gem push refinerycms-formtastic.gem