So I gave up on messing with Rails. I’m sure if I needed to work with Rails I could do it with no problems, but I’m not going to invest myself in it. If someone else wants to be tied to that Gem dependency nightmare, that’s not on me though.
In downloading Mephisto for Rails though I found something nice (I nearly wrote ‘found a gem,’ but that’s not a metaphor I want right now!): the Liquid template library for Ruby. I don’t know if Liquid learned from Django, Django learned from Liquid, or both learned from a third party, but I liked this template format in Django, so I’m definitely going to use it from now on in my own Ruby work.
Hmm… A grep in Liquid shows no reference to Django, and a grep in Django shows no reference to Liquid. So I’m assuming they both got this style elsewhere. Well whoever invented it, I like it.
I just need to make sure that this Liquid supports template inheritance. If not, I’ll add it. And then I’m rewriting my whole website to use it!