Formdown

Formdown is a way to create documents that need form elements such as contracts, tax filings, sign-up pages, business forms, etc. Based on Markdown, it puts an emphasis on readability and ease of authoring by humans in a plain text format that can be saved as a file and tracked by a version control system or easily shared. The content-focused nature of Formdown forces a separation of presentation that makes the resulting HTML web forms more accessible and responsive to a wider number of people with different disabilities or devices.

Example

The Formdown document:

Hi _________(Name)

How are you doing today? () Good () Ok () Bad

Could I have your email address? __________@(Email)

Write a few lines that describe your mood: ____________///(Mood)

[ Submit your feelings ]

Generates the following HTML:

<p>Hi   <input type="text" placeholder="Name" name="Name" size="9"></input>
</p>

<p>How are you doing today?   <input type="radio"></input>
 Good   <input type="radio"></input>
 Ok   <input type="radio"></input>
 Bad</p>

<p>Could I have your email address?   <input type="email" placeholder="Email" name="Email" size="10"></input>
</p>

<p>Write a few lines that describe your mood:   <textarea placeholder="Mood" name="Mood" cols="12" rows="3"></textarea>
</p>

<p>  <input type="submit" value="Submit your feelings"></input>
</p>

A more extensive reference of Formdown in action may be found in the kitchen sink fmd file. As this gem matures more extensive syntax documentation will be created for version 1.0.

Installation & Usage

Formdown works in most popular Ruby web frameworks, the command lin, and of course plain 'ol Ruby.

Rails

In the rails Gemfile, include the formdown gem via:

gem "formdown", require: "formdown/rails"

Rails will pick up files with the extension .fmd and render them as HTML. For example, app/views/user/my_form.html.fmd would render the formdown document.

Its recommended to use a layout around the Formdown file to handle the form submission action and surrounding HTML content.

Note: There's currently no simple way of mapping Formdown fields to ActiveRecord model attributes.

Sinatra

In the Gemfile, include the formdown gem via:

gem "formdown", require: "sinatra/formdown"

Place your Formdown file in the Sinatra ./views directory (e.g. views/my_form.html.fmd), then add the following route to your Sinatra app:

get '/my_form' do
  formdown :my_form
end

and the form will render at /my_form.

Middleman

In the Gemfile, include the formdown gem via:

gem "formdown", require: "middleman/formdown"

Place your Formdown file in the Middleman ./source directory and the form will render (e.g. source/my_form.html.fmd will render the form at /my_form.html)

Command line

Install the gem:

$ gem install formdown

The quickest way to render Formdown is via the command line. Just cat your file into the render and you'll get HTML:

$ cat my_form.fmd | formdown render > my_form.html

Now open my_form.html and enjoy all of that HTML goodness.

Ruby

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'formdown'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Write the following code in your Ruby application to compile the Formdown:

text = "What is your email address? _________@(Email)"
formdown = Formdown::Renderer.new(text)
formdown.to_html # => "<p>What is your email address?   <input type=\"email\" placeholder=\"Email\" name=\"Email\" size=\"9\"></input>\n</p>\n"

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/bradgessler/formdown/fork )
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request