Multiple Rails forks with separate designs and layouts

Question

I have a Rails project that is basically a simple web app for a membership-based organization. We've open sourced the code on Github for the web app so that others can use it, but have a licensed design/layout that the original organization is going to use. This layout cannot be open sourced. I was wondering if others have run into the situation where you have an open-source Rails app with a non-OS design.

My initial thought is to put app/views in .gitignore, and to have anyone forking the code add their own views directory, perhaps including an app/views_default directory with a web-app-theme layout or something else to get people running. Is this the best option (realizing that there are other files such as JavaScript, CSS, etc that come with the layout that must also be ignored).

Does anyone have some good thoughts or pointers on this?

Answer 1

Hoopla - svn:externals for Git.

Instead of git:ignore, you can push the non-open-source stuff somewhere else, and your open-source code on github. Use hoopla to manage the externals.

http://6brand.com/git-svn-externals-rails-plugins.html

Answer 2

Rails Theme_Support plugin: http://github.com/aussiegeek/theme_support (There are forks as well). You can create a theme directory with multiple themes, and load the theme programmatically in ApplicationController. This would allow anyone to use the application, and simply supply their own theme in the themes directory, and would allow the project to have a "default" theme which would serve as an example.