I know this is perverse but I wish the Django Template language was available for Rails.

Beat this:

{%extends ‘base’%}
{%block leftnav} a link {%endblock%}

{% block content %} this is the content {% endblock %}

{% block footer%} another link{%endblock%}

If you leave out a ‘block’ it will pick up the default content from its parent ‘base’ template. Everything between the blocks is rendered as per the parent template. In short, you can ‘extend’ the bits you want, or just render the parent template. A more detailed explanation is available here.

Compared to that, Rails lacks nested layouts. You can only have one level of inheritance: application-wide. There’s a nested_layout plugin that provides the required functionality, but it isn’t as elegant as the above Django example.

I’ve been looking at liquid, which looks similar to Django’s Templates, but it doesn’t seem to be documented well. I’m now looking at HAML, which seems promising, but I may just be too deep into the project to change now. I may have to survive on partials !