Page title helper

Ever wondered if there was an easier and DRY-way to set your page titles (and/or headings). Backed by Rails (only tested on 2.3.x) and it's new I18n-class the solution is a simple helper method.

In your layout add this to your <head>-section:

  ...
  <title><%=h page_title %></title>
  ...

That's it. Now just add your translations, to the locales, in e.g. config/locales/en.yml:

  en:
    contacts:
      index:
        title: "Contacts"

When contacs/index.html.erb is rendered, the key :en, :contacts, :index, :title is looked up and printed, together with the applications basename, like: My cool app - Contacts. The format etc. is of course configurable, just head down to the options.

Installation

As gem (from gemcutter.org, as of version 0.7.0):

sudo gem install page_title_helper [-s http://gemcutter.org]

# then add the following line to config/environment.rb
config.gem 'page_title_helper', :source => 'http://gemcutter.org'

or as plain old Rails plugin:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/lwe/page_title_helper.git

Customize titles

Need a custom title, or need to fill in some placeholders? Just use the bang method (page_title!), in e.g. contacts/show.html.erb the requirement is to display the contacts name in the <title>-tagas well as in the heading?

<h1><%=h page_title!(@contact.name) %></h1>

A call to page_title will now return the contacts name, neat :) if for example the <h1> does not match the <title>, then well, just do something like:

<% page_title!(@contact.name + " (" + @contact.company.name + ")") %>
<h1><%=h @contact.name %></h1>

Guess, that's it. Of course it's also possible to use translate with page_title!, to translate customzied titles, like:

# in config/locales/en.yml:
en:
  dashboard:
    index:
      title: "Welcome back, {{name}}"

# in app/views/dashboard/index.html.erb:
<h1><%=h page_title!(t('.title', :name => @user.first_name)) %></h1>

More fun with `:format`

The :format option is used to specify how a title is formatted, i.e. if the app name is prependor appended, or if it contains the account name etc. It uses a similar approach as paperclip's path interpolations:

page_title :format => ':title / :app' # => "Contacts / My cool app"

Adding custom interpolations is as easy as defining a block, for example to access the current controller:

PageTitleHelper.interpolates :controller do |env|
  env.controller.controller_name.humanize
end

page_title :format => ':title / :controller / :app' # => "Welcome back / Dashboard / My cool app"

To access just the title, without any magic app stuff interpolated or appended, use:

page_title! "untitled"
page_title :format => false # => "untitled"

Need a custom format for a single title? Just return an array:

# in the view:
<h1><%=h page_title!(@contact.name, ":title from :company - :app") %></h1> # => <h1>Franz Meyer</h1>

# in the <head>
<title><%=h(page_title) %></title> # => this time it will use custom title like "Franz Meyer from ABC Corp. - MyCoolApp"

To streamline that feature a bit and simplify reuse of often used formats, it's now possible to define format aliases like:

# in an initializer:
PageTitleHelper.formats[:with_company] = ":title from :company - :app"
PageTitleHelper.formats[:promo] = ":app - :title" # show app first for promo pages :)

# then in the view to display a contact...
page_title! @contact.name, :with_company

# ...or for the promo page via config/locales/en.yml (!)
en:
  pages:
    features:
      title:
        - "Features comparison"
        - !ruby/sym promo

Pretty, cool, aint it? The special :format => :app works also with the formats hash. Then there is also a :default format, which should be used to override the default format.

All options - explained

Option	Description	Default	Values
`:app`	Specify the applications name, however it's recommended to define the translation key `:'app.name'`.	Inflected from `RAILS_ROOT`	string
`:default`	String which is displayed when no translation exists and no custom title has been specified. Can also be set to a symbol or array to take advantage of `I18n.translate`s `:default` option.	`:'app.tagline'`	string, symbol or array of those
`:format`	Defines the output format, accepts a string containing multiple interpolations, or a symbol to a format alias, see More fun with `:format`. If set to +false+, just the current title is returned.	`:default`	string, symbol
`:suffix`	Not happy with the fact that the translations must be named like `en -> contacts -> index -> title`, but prefer e.g. them to be suffixed with `page_title`? Then just set `:suffix => :page_title`.	`:title`	symbol or string

If an option should be set globally it's possible to change the default options hash as follows:

PageTitleHelper.options[:suffix] = :page_title

Note, currently it only makes sense to set :default and/or :page_title globally. To add or change formats use:

# change the default format used (if no format is specified):
PageTitleHelper.formats[:default] = ":title // :app"

# add a custom format alias (which can be used with page_title(:format => :promo))
PageTitleHelper.formats[:promo] = ":app // :title"

Note: it's recommended to add this kind of stuff to an initializer.

A (maybe useful) interpolation

The internationalized controller name, with fallback to just display the humanized name:

PageTitleHelper.interpolates :controller do |env|
  I18n.t env.controller.controller_path.tr('/','.') + '.controller', :default => env.controller.controller_name.humanize
end

Note: Put this kind of stuff into an initilizer, like config/initializers/page_title.rb or someting like that.