I’ve been in Rails a lot lately, like daily, and one of my favorite aspects of Rails dev is the ecosystem. Another post will detail my love for the entire ecosystem but this post is about gems and the community. Practically anything you want to do in Rails is probably done already. It is insane how detailed some of the gems are but you definitely have simple one’s too.

I started diving into Bootstrap and found a solid tutorial for, take a guess, a gem to handle it for me. Pat Shaughnessy wrote an article about integrating Formtastic and Tabulous with Bootstrap. I followed the steps and it worked but Tabulous didn’t update work well with Bootstrap since it creates a wrapper on the ul element and you can’t control the elements css class.

So…being a Rails noob, I filed an issue and Wyatt Greene let me know he wasn’t doing updates on it for a while but encouraged me to take a stab. The rails noob in me was intimidated but as an experienced dev it ate me up not to have a fix for my need so I went to work on it.

I present to you…Tabulous with wrapper and container options. 🙂

After only an hour or so of jumping around, I have the fix implemented and the new tests work! My main issue was “rake test” wouldn’t work but “bundle exec rake test” would since I have rake 0.9.2.2 but Tabulous is set to a lower rake version.

#lovingrails