Fuel

By LaunchPad Lab.

Stop developing Rails blogs and start writing your actual blog posts with this dead simple blogging engine for Rails.

Fuel is still in beta but is actively being used in several production environments. The schema is very simple and consists of Posts and Authors and is namespaced under Fuel to ensure it won't interfere with any of your current models.

Screenshots are available here: http://learn.launchpadlab.com/fuel/

Gemfile:

gem "fuel", :git => "https://github.com/launchpadlab/fuel.git", branch: "master"

Terminal:

bundle
rails g fuel:install

See below for instructions on how to get image uploading wired up as blogging is no fun without pictures.

Paths

• Path to Admin Panel: /blog/admin
• Path to Blog: /blog

Admin Username / Password

The default username and password is admin and password, respectively. You can change these in config/initializers/fuel.rb:

config.username = "admin"

config.password = "password"

Views

If you want to customize the views, you can generate them in terminal:

rails generate fuel:views

Layout

You will probably want the blog posts to render within an existing layout of your application. By default, it will render within "application" layout. You can change this in config/initializers/fuel.rb:

config.layout = "application"

Logo

You can add your own logo to be used in the Blog Admin backoffice. Add your logo's image to your Rails app's images folder (app/assets/images) then update config/initializers/fuel.rb to reference that image like below. Note that the image should be square and at least 58 x 58 pixels.

config.logo = "your-image.png"

Fuel ships with Paperclip and S3 for uploading images for your blog posts and authors. To get these working, all you need to do is pass the right credentials to the below variables defined in config/initializers/fuel.rb:

  # AWS S3 SETTINGS
  config.aws_bucket = ENV['AWS_BUCKET']
  config.aws_access_key = ENV["AWS_ACCESS_KEY"]
  config.aws_secret_access_key = ENV["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"]

We recommend using Figaro to properly set these environment variables:

# config/application.yml

AWS_ACCESS_KEY: your-s3-access-key
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: your-s3-secret-key

development:
  AWS_BUCKET: your-development-s3-bucket
production:
  AWS_BUCKET: your-production-s3-bucket

In order for the uploads to work, you will need to change your CORS settings on each of your S3 buckets in Amazon S3's admin console (i.e. both your development and production and possibly staging if you have that environment as well). You can find the file in: your-bucket => Properties => Permissions => Edit CORS Configuration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<CORSConfiguration xmlns="http://s3.amazonaws.com/doc/2006-03-01/">
  <CORSRule>
    <AllowedOrigin>http://localhost:3000</AllowedOrigin>
    <AllowedMethod>GET</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>POST</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedMethod>PUT</AllowedMethod>
    <AllowedHeader>*</AllowedHeader>
  </CORSRule>
</CORSConfiguration>

To set proper og:graph meta data for your blog, add the following to the head of your main layout (such as application.html.erb):

<% if content_for?(:meta_tags) %>
  <%= yield(:meta_tags) %>
<% else %>
  <!-- default meta tags here -->
<% end %>

Twitter

Set config.twitter = true in initializer:

# config/initializers/fuel.rb
config.twitter = true

To see our HTML <title> and <meta> description for your blog, you have access to two instance variables: @title and @description. These should be called in your layout template for your blog as follows:

<title><%= @title %></title>
<meta name="description" content="<%= @description %>">

Note:

For your blog index page, @title and @description are defined in your Fuel configuration file.

For your blog post show page, @title and @description are defined by the values on your post for seo_title and seo_description respectively.

Facebook Share

Note: the purpose of this integration is for creating a custom share dialog link via the Javascript SDK. For more simplistic integrations, like the default Facebook Share button, please see this guide: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/share-button

1. Create a Facebook application via developer.facebook.com and put your application ID in Fuel's initializer file (config/initializers/fuel.rb)
2. Add a link in your view with class "fuel-fb" and data-url corresponding with the post:

<%= link_to "Facebook", '#', class: "fuel-fb", data: { url: fuel.post_url(@post) } %>

Note that until your application is deployed to a public domain, Facebook will not pull your og:graph meta information into the share dialog window.

Disqus Commenting

In config/initializers/fuel.rb, uncomment the following line and replace the name with your disqus account name:

config.disqus_name = 'your_disqus_name'

Including Your Own Helpers

By default, Fuel will only include your ApplicationHelper. You can tell Fuel to include additional helper files as well at config/initializers/fuel.rb:

config.helpers = ["ApplicationHelper",
                  #"another_helper",
                  ]

Interested in contributing to the Fuel project? Please contact ryan@launchpadlab.com for local setup instructions and proper ENV variables.

Copyright (c) 2015 LaunchPad Lab

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.