🌲 Forest

Forest is a Rails CMS that makes creating and managing websites easy. It draws inspiration from Wordpress' dashboard and makes it easy to upload images, manage menus, create users with permissions, etc.

Generating a new app

rails new myapp --database=postgresql

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'forest', git: 'https://github.com/dylanfisher/forest.git'

Install gems

$ bundle

Create database and run migrations

$ rails db:create

Run Forest install generator and follow post-install prompts

$ rails g forest:install

Update your ApplicationRecord to inherit from Forest::ApplicationRecord, or just delete the file.

class ApplicationRecord < Forest::ApplicationRecord
end

Add the blocks directory to Rails' autoload paths:

# application.rb
config.autoload_paths << "#{config.root}/app/models/blocks"

You may want to add the following code to make it easy to monkey patch Forest's classes:

# application.rb
config.to_prepare do
  # Load application's model / class decorators
  Dir.glob(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), "../app/**/*_decorator*.rb")) do |c|
    Rails.configuration.cache_classes ? require(c) : load(c)
  end
end

Additional instructions and deployment suggestions are outlined in the Wiki.

For an example of a host app running Forest, view github.com/dylanfisher/forest_blog.

Features

Forest aims to include the following features out of the box.

Pages

Pages are schedulable and draftable. Each page is composed of a series of blocks that a user can use to create dynamic page layouts. Additional blocks are easy to develop using regular Ruby classes and methods. Forest doesn't use any custom DSL.

Media Browser

An intuitive media browser, similar to Wordpress, is included by default and features multi-file drag and drop upload, and an easy to use modal interface for selecting associated files.

A draggable, nestable interface for managing menus, similar to Wordpress.

Users

Users and user groups, a permissions system, and secure authentication using Devise.

Creating additional block types

First, run the block type generator. Make sure to restart your server when generating new blocks.

rails generate forest:block TitleAndTextBlock title:string content:text

Custom SimpleForm inputs

A number of custom SimpleForm inputs and components are baked into Forest: https://github.com/dylanfisher/forest/wiki/SimpleForm-inputs-&-components

Video associations uploaded as Media Items

# in your migration
add_reference :video_blocks, :video, foreign_key: { to_table: :media_items }

# video_block.rb
belongs_to :video, class_name: 'MediaItem'

<%= f.association :media_item, label: 'Video', remote: { path: admin_media_items_path(videos: true) } %>

Custom error pages

Add this line to application.rb to tell your host app to use the router to handle errors.

config.exceptions_app = self.routes

Delete the error pages in /public to avoid collision with the custom error pages.

Forest's router will render the appropriate error template via ErrorsController. Override the placeholder views to customize the error page.

To test the errors in development, set the following config to false.

# development.rb
config.consider_all_requests_local = false

Forest makes it easy to integrate with Elasticsearch. Just include the Searchable concern in any ActiveRecord models that you want to be searchable.

Then, override the SearchIndexManager method below to indicate which models should be indexed.

SearchIndexManager.class_eval do
  def self.indexed_models
    [Page, BlogPost]
  end
end

Index your documents using the tasks in forest_elasticsearch_tasks.rake. To rebuild the search index, you'd run:

bin/rails forest:elasticsearch:rebuild

Primary Dependencies

Forest relies heavily on the following gems, software and frameworks:

  • bootstrap
  • cocoon
  • devise
  • has_scope
  • jquery
  • kaminari
  • paperclip
  • postgres
  • pundit
  • redcarpet
  • simpleform

TODO

Better Documentation

  • [ ] document how to use has_many_ordered and how to make it work in more complex scenarios, e.g. has_many_ordered :program_artists, through: :program_program_artists, has_many_options: { source: 'artist' }

Big Picture

  • [ ] change references to model names and other hard coded names to use I18n
  • [ ] model resource_description should use I18n
  • [ ] add rake task to download database dumps from heroku and store in S3
  • [ ] add additional og tags http://ogp.me/
  • [ ] add schema.org microdata where appopriate, e.g. for navigation menus, headers, footers
  • [ ] is it better to namespace engine?
  • [ ] tests

Admin

  • [ ] simpleMDE markdown editor has a bug where sometimes the text area gets messed up and needs to have the page resize functions run to work properly again.
  • [ ] fix user login page view when signing up for the first time and passwords don't match.
  • [ ] nested forms are cumbersome at laptop size. It should be easier to rearrange nested items.
  • [ ] add ability to insert nested form items in between other nested items.
  • [ ] do something more useful with the admin#show view
  • [ ] email confirmations for user related actions
  • [ ] versioning option for data associated pages, settings, menus, etc.
  • [ ] version diff UI like wordpress?
  • [ ] modal to create associated records directly from association page?
  • [ ] bulk actions to delete pages (and other records)
  • [ ] duplicate records
  • [ ] add an option to repeater field to allow adjusting number of fields in each repeated set.
  • [ ] remove font-awesome dependency from simplemde markdown editor

Pages

  • [ ] proper drafting/publishing permissions for drafted/published pages
  • [ ] better page versioning, page history navigation, restore content blocks with page version

Blocks

  • [ ] add a duplicate block button to make adding additional blocks of the same type quicker and easier
  • [ ] is it possible to add the ability to create blocks within nested forms?
  • [ ] minimum and maximum blocks per layout

Media Gallery

  • [ ] add drag and drop upload to media item edit view
  • [ ] add direct to S3 file upload for large files like video, that otherwise look like they timeout on heroku
  • [ ] use mini_magick or similar, more efficient image editor to process paperclip files
  • [ ] better media item upload in media_item#edit
  • [ ] crop tool and other enhancements
  • [ ] configure paperclip to generate optimized images so that google page speed test doesn't complain about the lack of savings.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing to this project please get in touch.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.