Contentable

Contentable is a gem for easing the integration of chunks of dynamic content. For situations in which content which needs to be inserted here in there in some web application, but which should be updatable on the fly, you could go with a content management system, but if you also need other models and the rest of the power of rails, that isn’t the best solution. This gem addresses this issue by allowing you to create content_items which house content (using textile) and give you easy display (etc) access to this content, either as full page content or as a simple block of content to be embedded within some other dynamic page.

The basics of use of this gem are as follows.

1. First, include the gem in your Gemfile
2. Next scaffold out a content_item model with fields name:string title:string description:string text:text. Alternatively (preferably really) there is a migration helper which goes along the lines of create_content_items that does this for you; just include that method call within def self.up.
3. Put the line acts_as_contentable in your ContentItem model
4. Use display_content(content_item) in your views (or display_textile(some_textile_text))
5. Include Contentable::Controller in your ContentItemController to gain access to the find_content_item controller method which first looks to see if params[:id] is defined and then looks to see if params[name] is defined. The the first isn’t but the latter is, the action will grab the content item based on the name passed through. Now you can set up routes that easily take advantage of this so that your content item name attributes can behave like parts of a path.
6. You can also call ContentItem#safe_find_by_name(name) directly (the method able is just a wrapper of this). If that name queried for is not found, the method returns a (either new or old, depending on whether the situation has ever happened before) content item named content_missing. This content item will be given a missing attribute (in local memory, not in db) which stores the name of the missing content item. This name can then be used for easier creation of content that should exist but does not yet.

• Either add validation for requiring content item text to not be blank or have the display_content helper method gracefully handle situations in which ContentItem#text is nill.

• Make it so that the class you include contentable in can be named whatever your want (BIG ONE)
• Make helpers for using javascript to automatically render the textile as you type it.
• Put in validations on name of content items so that they can always be used as paths?
• Create validations/protections on changing the content_item name
• Create generators for view code, (migrations, etc?)
• ContentItem manager (a sort of default content item index which allows an admin to manage content items)
• Support other markup languages
• Integrate the textile helper
• Routing helpers

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Add specs for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a
  future version unintentionally.
• Commit, do not mess with rakefile, version, or history.
  (if you want to have your own version, that is fine but bump version in a commit by itself I can ignore when I pull)
• Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

Copyright © 2010 metasoarous (Christopher Small). See LICENSE for details.