The Blocks gem is many things.

It acts as:

• a container for reusable blocks of code and options
• a common interface for rendering code, whether the code was defined previously in Ruby blocks, Rails partials, or proxies to other blocks of code
• a series of hooks and wrappers that can be utilized to render code before, after, and around other blocks of code, as well as before each, after each, and around each item in a collection
• a templating utility for easily building reusable and highly customizable UI components
• a means for DRYing up oft-repeated code in your layouts and views
• a simple mechanism for changing or skipping the rendering behavior for particular blocks of code

Essentially, this all boils down to the following: Blocks makes it easy to define blocks of code that can be rendered either verbatim or with replacements and modifications at some later point in time.

Please checkout the documentation for the Blocks gem here: http://hunterae.github.io/blocks/.

Blocks requires Rails 3.0 or greater and Ruby 2.0 or greater.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'blocks'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install blocks

After checking out the repo, run bundle install (and possibly gem install bundler if you don't already have bundler installed) to install dependencies. Then, run rake to run the tests. You can also run bundle console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

The documentation is generated using Jekyll and hosted on the Blocks gh-pages branch.

The static content is generated based on the source code within the docs directory.

To run the documentation locally or make changes for a corresponding pull request, follow the steps in the Development Section above. Then run jekyll serve and visit http://127.0.0.1:4000/blocks/.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/hunterae/blocks.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.