Pagelime Rails Plugin

Easily add the Pagelime CMS to your Rails app.

Pagelime is a simple CMS service that allows you to define editable regions in your pages without installing any software on your website or app. Simply add a class="cms-editable" to any HTML element, and log-in to the Pagelime CMS service to edit your content and images with a nice, simple UI. We host all of the code, content, and data until you publish a page. When you publish a page, the PageLime CMS pushes the content to your website via secure FTP or an API. Using the Rails plugin, we pull the new content into your app dynamically via an API.

Quick Start (2 lines of code!)

First, add the cms-editable class and an id to make content editable:

<div id="my_content" class="cms-editable">
  This content is now editable in Pagelime... no code... no databases... no fuss
</div>

Second, add acts_as_cms_editable to your controller to display the latest content:

class CmsPagesController < ApplicationController
  acts_as_cms_editable
end

Done!

Getting Started

Requirements

Pagelime account (either standalone pagelime.com or via the Pagelime Heroku add-on)
Pagelime Rack gem (pagelime-rack)

Step 1: Install the Pagelime Rails gem

For Rails 3

Edit your Gemfile and add

gem "pagelime-rack"
gem "pagelime-rails"

then run

bundle install

For Rails 2 (not officially supported)

Edit your config/environment.rb file and add:

config.gem "pagelime-rack"
config.gem "pagelime-rails"

then run

rake gems:install

Step 2: Setup your Pagelime credentials

(Skip if using Heroku add-on)

If you are NOT using the Pagelime Heroku add-on, set up an account at pagelime.com. Make sure that the "Integration Method" for your site on the advanced tab is set to "web services".

Step 3: Configure your application

For any controller that renders views that you want editable, add the acts_as_cms_editable behavior like so:

class CmsPagesController < ApplicationController
  # attach the cms behavior to the controller
  acts_as_cms_editable

  def index
  end
end

You can pass an :except parameter just like with a filter like so:

acts_as_cms_editable :except => :index

Caching and logging are automatically setup using your Rails configuration. You can specify custom caching and logging by adding the following to an initializer file.

Pagelime.configure do |config|

  # object that responds to `fetch` and `delete`
  config.cache = Rails.cache

  # options passed to `fetch(key, options = {}, &block)`
  config.cache_fetch_options = { :expires_in => 1.year }

  # any standard logger
  config.logger = Rails.logger

end

It is highly recommended that you enable server caching to reduce latency on each request when retrieving CMS content. MemCachier has a great Heroku addon for caching if you don't have caching configured.

Rack Middleware

The Rack::Pagelime middleware is inserted before Rack::ConditionalGet to retrieve CMS content before HTTP caching is performed.

Additional configuration options

Read the pagelime-rack documentation for more configuration options.

Step 4: Make pages editable

Create some editable regions in your views like so:

<div id="my_content" class="cms-editable">
  this is now editable
</div>

The ID and the class are required for the CMS to work

Optionally: If you don't want to have your entire controller CMS editable for some reason, you can sorround areas in your view with a code block like so:

<% cms_content do %>
  <div id="my_content" class="cms-editable">
    hello world
  </div>
<% end %>

Step 5: Edit your pages!

For Heroku users

If you're using the Pagelime Heroku add-on, go to the Heroku admin for your app and under the "Resources" tab you will see the Pagelime add-on listed. Click on the add-on name and you will be redirected to the Pagelime CMS editor. From there you can edit any page in your Rails app!

For Pagelime.com users

If you have a standalone Pagelime account, simply go to pagelime.com and edit your site as usual (see Step 2).