Formtastic Sneaky Preview

Published 30 May 08 by Justin French

Last night at Melbourne Ruby I gave a quick presentation of the Formtastic Rails FormBuilder plugin I’ve been working on, and thought it was about time I announced it here also.

The README serves as a pretty good introduction to what I’m trying to do, so please just go and read that instead.

If you’re too lazy for that, it’s a sweet DSL for authoring forms, a FormBuilder that goes to great lengths to provide semantically rich markup with plenty of hooks for stylesheet authors, and a (work-in-progress) set of stylesheets that make that mark-up look great For Free™.

Xavier Shay has been bold enough to start using it in the wonderful Enki, and I’m using it on a few small projects for friends, so I hope we might be at a 1.0-ish stable and useful release in a month or two.

Side note: If you haven’t yet discovered the bliss of Github/Git combo, please sign-up for an account, start following me, start watching Formtastic, start forking some things and it will soon become crystal clear just how well the Github team have nailed the social side of open source software development, and how much sense distributed version control makes.