ruby script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/acts_as_textiled

You will need to install the RedCloth gem

gem install redcloth

Add to required model

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

View Helpers:

  >> story = Story.find(3)
  => #

  >> story.description
  => "This is cool."

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

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

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

  >> story.save
  => true

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

  >> story.textiled = false
  => false

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

  >> story.textiled = true
  => true

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

== Different Modes

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

== form_for

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:  <%= f.text_field :description %>
  <% end %>

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

== form tags

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

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

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

== Pre-fetching

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.

There is currently no advanced documentation for this plugin.