Lines Blog by Opoloo

<img src=“https://badge.fury.io/rb/lines-engine.svg” alt=“Gem Version” />

Introduction

Lines is a customizable blog framework for rails developers. It aims at making publishing simple and beautiful.

Lines is a very slim, feature-constrained, young publishing platform. It is not wordpress or blogger and it doesn’t aspire to be. It needs brains, work, and time to mature. It is a framework for tech-savvies who care about their content with the freedom of full OSS access.

To get an idea of the appearance, see the screenshots below, visit the Lines Website, or see it in action at link: blog.opoloo.com

Features & Specifications

  • solid editing system

  • simple, consistent publishing process

  • clear, responsive presentation

  • extendable & customizable

  • full focus on content

Features

  • 960x540 px hero graphics for posts

  • upload default hero images that you want to use more frequently

  • customizable generic titles & subtitles

  • automatic teaser & scaled image for the article overview

  • determine featured article

  • six headline styles according to priority

  • italics & bold text

  • block quotes

  • images, lists, links

  • tags for articles

  • G+ link to social network discussion

  • multiple authors and author information (for your small company or guest authors)

  • add documents for download

  • formatting help

  • direct RSS reader access

  • code highlighting

Installation

  1. Add the gem to your Gemfile:

    gem 'lines-engine'

  2. Run ‘bundle’:

    bundle

  3. There is a installation task that will guide you through the rest of the installation process. Just switch to your application directory and run:

    rails g lines:install

  4. Adjust settings for Lines in the newly generated config/lines_config.yml file.

  5. Run database migrations:

    rake db:migrate

If you need some more information or help, you can just follow this readme file.

Managing admin users

Currently Lines does not offer a GUI for managing users, but you can use a rake task to do so:

rake lines:add_user

To update an existing user, you’ll need the rails console with ‘rails c’

# UPDATE an existing user
u = User.find_by_email('[email protected]')
u.email = "[email protected]"
u.password = "newsekret"
u.save

Google Sitemap

The sitemap_generator gem (github.com/kjvarga/sitemap_generator) handles the creation of sitemaps for search engines. To update the sitemap on server, run:

bundle exec rake sitemap:refresh:no_ping # don't ping search engines
bundle exec rake sitemap:refresh         # ping search engines

Don’t forget to adjust the full url to your sitemaps in public/robots.txt

Documentation

The complete documentation can be found at rdoc.info: rdoc.info/github/opoloo/lines/master/frames

Customization

Modify CSS/SCSS

Default viewer SCSS: app/assets/stylesheets/lines/style.css.scss

Modify custom hero images

You can add, remove or change the HERO_IMAGES variable inside the config/lines_config.yml file. The corresponding images reside inside the public/heroes directory.

Header (Meta) & Footer

To change the header/meta/footer elements you need to modify app/views/layouts/lines/application.html.erb

Screenshots

Some screenshots to get an impression of the look & feel

Dashboard

Create or edit an article

Preview and publish

License

You may use the Lines blog template as you please. You must, however, keep the footer section, so attribution to Lines and Opoloo is granted.

We heartily invite you to extend the features of the template, but when you do, you should fork it on GitHub, so everyone can profit from your work.

You can see the full license here: choosealicense.com/licenses/lgpl-v3/