CODEWITHSUNDEEP
ruby-on-railscsstemplates
wastedhours
wastedhours

Reputation: 257

Letting users write DB-stored CSS for custom layouts

I'm currently building a web app (atop Ruby on Rails), which will let users style their own areas (personal blog pages), and was wondering what are the best ways of accomplishing this?

I think Liquid for templating would be good, but how would you handle styling? My aim was to have a DB field associated with each blog dubbed "style" which will store a custom stylesheet, is this the best approach?

I've tried it so far with the "sanitize_css" helper method, but it just strips the "#stylebox" tags out, meaning nothing is displayed.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1479

Answers (4)

Stephen Watkins
Stephen Watkins

Reputation: 25765

If your going to allow areas for users to have complete control over their CSS, then I would probably avoid the database altogether and use a structured file system approach. You could create a sub-domain or folder for each user that contains a main.css. This also allows you to scale well as features grow for your user (pictures, etc.)

With that said, as Robbie mentioned, you might want to consider limiting what styles a user can and can not control. Otherwise, you would probably find things getting out of hand quickly. For this approach, you would probably want to use the database for storing property values of the elements that can be modified.

Upvotes: 0

Robbie
Robbie

Reputation: 725

I would honestly allow themable elements on your page, and then store each of those style rules as a field (or conglomerate them into one giant field) in the database. Enforce some validation to ensure that they don't use any funny business (if they're only coding for specific div's, they shouldn't need to use any curly braces.)

Then generate the CSS on the fly.

The reason? If you ever want to serve up ad's on your site, and you allow them to just upload the entirety of their CSS, they can easily turn off visibility on the ad div.

I think it's "safer" to control what they're allowed to theme; sure more advanced users will get ticked. But do you really want to be the next MySpace? ;-)

Upvotes: 0

sameera207
sameera207

Reputation: 16629

Currently I'm also working on almost a similar requirement as you do. I'm also trying to create a CMS for users to add pages, style them etc..

My Approach as follows

each user will have his/her subdomain. (I use a before_filter to get the current users subdomain and load his/her website)

About styling, I prefer to have the style sheet as a physical file. Given that your method will have the more flexibility of editing the style sheet, I dont like the idea of having the stlesheet code on top of my page. Insted, I allow users to load their styleshets (Using paper clip)

So when the site loads I will get the css paths from the DB and load the stylesheet from the path.

Later I'm planning to read the file and load it to a textarea so that users can edit their stylesheets and when saving override the existing file;

For layouts i use liquid as well

cheers

sameera

Upvotes: 3

Anish Joseph
Anish Joseph

Reputation: 1026

if there is too much of code then serialize the data and store it as text in db. That would be much better i think

Upvotes: 0

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