Thesis Rails

NOTE: Thesis Rails has been deprecated. If you're interested in maintaining it, please email hello@infinite.red.

See also Thesis Phoenix for an Elixir take on Thesis.

Most Rails content management systems make you conform to their system from the start, making it difficult to just "drop in" the gem and make it work with your CMS. Thesis tries to be a drop-in CMS that doesn't hijack your development workflow and stays out of the way.

Thesis is a research project of Infinite Red, a web and mobile development company based in Portland, OR and San Francisco, CA.

• Rails 4.0.x (or higher)
• ActiveRecord on MySQL, PostgresQL, or SQLite3
• Ruby 2.0.0 (or higher)
• jQuery
• File hosting or Amazon S3 (for image upload)

In your Gemfile:

gem 'thesis', '~> 0.1'

Then run these from your command line:

bundle install
rails g thesis:install
rake db:migrate

This will install thesis and add the database tables.

API Reference

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Thesis does not force you to use a particular user or authentication strategy.

Instead, it adds a method into your application_controller.rb file that allows you to hook up your own authentication logic.

• If you return false from this method, nothing will show up client-side nor will the page be editable.
• If you return true from this method, the Thesis editor will appear and the page will be editable.

def page_is_editable?(page)
  logged_in? && current_user.admin? # Devise + admin boolean
end

def page_is_editable?(page)
  can? :update, page # CanCanCan
end

def page_is_editable?(page)
  true # Just let everyone edit everything
end

def page_is_editable?(page)
  if current_user.admin?
    true
  elsif page.parent == Thesis::Page.find_by(name: "Blog")
    true
  else
    false
  end
end

Thesis creates two straightforward ActiveRecord tables: pages and page_contents. Since they're normal ActiveRecord models, you're free to use them in your code however you want.

  t.integer :parent_id
  t.string  :name
  t.string  :slug
  t.string  :title
  t.string  :description
  t.integer :sort_order, default: 0, null: false
  t.string  :template, default: "default", null: false
  t.timestamps

  t.integer :page_id,           null: false
  t.string  :name,              null: false
  t.text    :content,           default: "Edit This Content Area"
  t.string  :content_type,      default: :html
  t.timestamps

Thesis's installer will drop a page_templates folder into your app/views folder. This is where you put different styles of pages for use in the CMS. Thesis will install an ERB, HAML, or Slim version, depending on your configuration.

Pages come with a few built-in fields for use in SEO meta tags.

head
  title = current_page.title || "Default Title"
  meta content="#{current_page.description}" type="description"

Place this right after your opening body tag to embed the Thesis editor. It will only show up if your page_is_editable? method returns true.

body
  = thesis_editor

Use root_pages to get a list of pages at the root level. You can use the page's name and path accessors in your links.

nav
  ul
    li = link_to "Home", root_path # You can mix and match dynamic and static pages
    - root_pages.each do |p|
      li = link_to p.name, p.path
    li = link_to "Static Page", static_page_path

Content areas are accessible from any page using the content method. This method takes two arguments: name and type. Type defaults to :html. The only other type is :text (for now) which is plain text, no HTML accepted. :image will be added soon.

Referencing a content area in a page template will create one if it doesn't exist already, using the default: value.

article
  = current_page.content("Main Content", :html, default: "<p>This is my default HTML content.<p>")
  = current_page.content("Splash Image", :image, default: "/assets/default-image.jpg") # coming soon
aside
  = current_page.content("Sidebar Content", :html)
footer
  p = current_page.content("Footer Content", :text, default: "Copyright Me")

Thesis will automatically handle routes for pages you create with Thesis. Your routes will take precedence over Thesis-created pages, so if you create a page with Thesis called "About" and you already have a route for get "about" => "something#else" Thesis won't show the page.

You can't have it all. Thesis isn't the same as other -bloated- full-functioned content management systems out there. This is a list of what it's not now and not likely to be in the future.

We reserve the right to change our mind, however, especially with well planned and written pull requests to help prod us in the right direction. :-)

1. A WordPress Replacement
2. A full featured CMS
3. A full featured WYSIWYG editor
4. An authentication or permission system
5. A gem that works well with Sinatra or non-ActiveRecord ORMs
6. Anything other than a basic editor for pages and page content

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Write tests for your new feature
5. Run rake spec in the root directory to ensure that all tests pass.
6. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
7. Create new Pull Request

• Jamon Holmgren @jamonholmgren
• Daniel Berkompas @dberkom
• The Infinite Red team

Thesis Rails, as an open source project, is free to use and always will be. Infinite Red offers premium Thesis Rails support and general mobile app design/development services. Email us at hello@infinite.red to get in touch with us for more details.