This simple plugin allows you to forget about constantly rendering Textile in your application. Instead, you can rest easy knowing the Textile fields you want to display as HTML will always be displayed as HTML (unless you tell your code otherwise).

No database modifications are needed.

You need RedCloth, of course. And Rails.

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_textiled :body_text, :description
end

>> story = Story.find(3)
=> #<Story:0x245fed8 ... >

>> story.description
=> "<p>This is <strong>cool</strong>.</p>"

>> story.description(:source)
=> "This is *cool*."

>> story.description(:plain)
=> "This is cool."

>> story.description = "I _know_!"
=> "I _know_!"

>> story.save
=> true

>> story.description
=> "<p>I <em>know</em>!</p>"

>> story.textiled = false
=> false

>> story.description
=> "I _know_!"

>> story.textiled = true
=> true

>> story.description
=> "<p>I <em>know</em>!</p>"

RedCloth supports different modes, such as :lite_mode. To use a mode on a specific attribute simply pass it in as an options hash after any attributes you don’t want to mode-ify. Like so:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_textiled :body_text, :description => :lite_mode
end

Or:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_textiled :body_text => :lite_mode, :description => :lite_mode
end

You can also pass in multiple modes per attribute:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_textiled :body_text, :description => [ :lite_mode, :no_span_caps ]
end

Get it? Now let’s say you have an admin tool and you want the text to be displayed in the text boxes / fields as plaintext. Do you have to change all your views?

Hell no.

Are you using form_for? If you are, you don’t have to change any code at all.

<% form_for :story, @story do |f| %>
  Description: <br/> <%= f.text_field :description %>
<% end %>

You’ll see the Textile plaintext in the text field. It Just Works.

If you’re being a bit unconvential, no worries. You can still get at your raw Textile like so:

Description: <br/> <%= text_field_tag :description, @story.description(:source) %>

And there’s always object.textiled = false, as demo’d above.

acts_as_textiled locally caches rendered HTML once the attribute in question has been requested. Obviously this doesn’t bode well for marshalling or caching.

If you need to force your object to build and cache HTML for all textiled attributes, call the textilize method on your object.

If you’re real crazy you can even do something like this:

class Story < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_textiled :body_text, :description

  def after_find
    textilize
  end
end

All your Textile will now be ready to go in spiffy HTML format. But you probably won’t need to do this.

Enjoy.

• By Chris Wanstrath [ chris[at]ozmmorg ]