Task Lists

NOTE: This repository is no longer supported or updated by GitHub. If you wish to continue to develop this code yourself, we recommend you fork it.

This package provides various components necessary for integrating Task Lists into your GitHub-flavored-Markdown user content.

Components

The Task List feature is made of several different components:

• GitHub-flavored-Markdown Ruby Filter
• Summary Ruby Model: summarizes task list items
• JavaScript: frontend task list update behavior
• CSS: styles Markdown task list items

Usage & Integration

The backend components are designed for rendering the Task List item checkboxes, and the frontend components handle updating the Markdown source (embedded in the markup).

Backend: Markdown pipeline filter

Rendering Task List item checkboxes from source Markdown depends on the TaskList::Filter, designed to integrate with the html-pipeline gem. For example:

require 'html/pipeline'
require 'task_list/filter'

pipeline = HTML::Pipeline.new [
  HTML::Pipeline::MarkdownFilter,
  TaskList::Filter
]

pipeline.call "- [ ] task list item"

Frontend: Markdown Updates

Task List updates on the frontend require specific HTML markup structure, and must be enabled with JavaScript.

Rendered HTML (the <ul> element below) should be contained in a js-task-list-container container element and include a sibling textarea.js-task-list-field element that is updated when checkboxes are changed.

- [ ] text

<div class="js-task-list-container">
  <ul class="task-list">
    <li class="task-list-item">
      <input type="checkbox" class="js-task-list-item-checkbox" disabled />
      text
    </li>
  </ul>
  <form>
    <textarea class="js-task-list-field">- [ ] text</textarea>
  </form>
</div>

Enable Task List updates with:

$('.js-task-list-container').taskList('enable')

NOTE: Updates are not persisted to the server automatically. Persistence is the responsibility of the integrating application, accomplished by hooking into the tasklist:change JavaScript event. For instance, we use AJAX to submit a hidden form on update.

Read through the documented behaviors and samples in the source for more detail, including documented events.

Installation

Task Lists are packaged as both a RubyGem with both backend and frontend behavior, and a Bower package with just the frontend behavior.

Backend: RubyGem

For the backend Ruby components, add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'task_list'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Frontend: Bower

For the frontend components, add task_list to your Bower dependencies config.

This is the preferred method for including the frontend assets in your application. Alternatively, for Rails methods using Sprockets, see below.

Frontend: Rails 3+ Railtie method

# config/application.rb
require 'task_list/railtie'

Frontend: Rails 2.3 Manual method

Wherever you have your Sprockets setup:

Sprockets::Environment.new(Rails.root) do |env|
  # Load TaskList assets
  require 'task_list/railtie'
  TaskList.asset_paths.each do |path|
    env.append_path path
  end
end

If you're not using Sprockets, you're on your own but it's pretty straight forward. task_list/railtie defines TaskList.asset_paths which you can use to manage building your asset bundles.

Dependencies

At a high level, the Ruby components integrate with the html-pipeline library, and the frontend components depend on the jQuery library. The frontend components are written in CoffeeScript and need to be preprocessed for production use.

Testing and Development

JavaScript unit tests can be run with script/testsuite.

Ruby unit tests can be run with rake test.

Functional tests are useful for manual testing in the browser. To run, install the necessary components with script/bootstrap then run the server:

rackup -p 4011

Navigate to http://localhost:4011/test/functional/test_task_lists_behavior.html

Community Integration

• Waffle.io
• HuBoard

Contributing

Read the Contributing Guidelines and open a Pull Request!