For the new style changes for confabulus, I made use of the content_for capabilities in rails. The currently has two sections, main and sidebar. content_for makes implementing this quite easy. In your layout file (example application.html.erb under app/views/layouts), you use a <%= yield :sectionname %> to place each of the sctions. Here I used <%= yield :sidebar %> to include my sidebar section. :sidebar is just the name I chose for the section.
<div class="right" id="main_right"> <div id="sidebar"> <%= yield :sidebar%> </div> </div>
Then in the view for the page, you need to define the content for each section, for sidebar I have:
<% content_for :sidebar do %> <h2>Please Login</h2> <div class="content"> ... full view code omitted ... <% end %>
So my views are of the form of:
<% content_for :sidebar do %> ... sidebar content goes here ... <% end %> <% content_for :main do %> ... main content goes here ... <% end %>
You can do this for an arbitrary number of sections.
One thing to note is that if you are converting and forget to put a content_for block around the code, your view will render empty.