Compass

Compass is a stylesheet authoring tool that uses the Sass stylesheet language to make your stylesheets smaller and your web site easier to maintain. Compass provides ports of the best of breed css frameworks that you can use without forcing you to use their presentational class names. It’s a new way of thinking about stylesheets that must be seen in action!

An introduction to Compass from Lorin Tackett on Vimeo.

Installing

Compass is a tool that runs on the command line.

On any system with ruby installed, open your terminal and type:

gem install compass

This will install Compass and Sass too. Verify that compass is installed:

compass version

Creating a stand-alone project

compass create myproject
mate myproject
compass watch myproject

If you don't have TextMate, substitute the mate myproject part with the text editor of your choice. Edit the *.scss files in the src directory. These files are yours and you can change them as you see fit, delete them, make new ones, etc. Compass will automatically compile them into css in the stylesheets directory whenever they change.

Rails Support

compass init rails /path/to/myrailsproject

Installing a framework

When creating a new project:

compass create myproject --using blueprint/basic

When installing into an existing project:

cd myproject
compass install blueprint/semantic

With Rails:

compass init rails /path/to/myrailsproject --using blueprint/semantic

Bugs Reports, Discussions, Support

Send a note to the mailing list and/or File a bug.