Pointless Feedback

A Rails engine that provides a platform for your app to submit user feedback to a specified service. Messages are stored in your database as a fail-safe when the specified service is unavailable. Currently, only email, Unfuddle, and Github Issues are supported.

Brought to you by the fine folks at Viget and commissioned under Pointless Corp.

Versions
Installation
Configuration
Customization
Development
Roadmap
Contributors

Versions

For Rails 3.x support, use Pointless Feedback version 1.x.

For Rails 4.x and greater, use Pointless Feedback version 4.x.

Additionally, Pointless 4.x will only support Ruby 2.x.

Installation

To install, simply add the following to your Gemfile:

gem 'pointless_feedback'

After you install Pointless Feedback and add it to your Gemfile, you need to run the generator and install the engine migrations:

bundle exec rails generate pointless_feedback:install
bundle exec rake pointless_feedback:install:migrations
bundle exec rake db:migrate

The generator will install an initializer which describes ALL Pointless Feedback's configuration options and you MUST take a look at it. When you are done, you are ready to mount the routes in your config/routes.rb file.

mount PointlessFeedback::Engine, :at => '/feedback'

Pointless Feedback uses flash messages to let users know if feedback was successfully sent. Pointless Feedback expects your application to call flash[:notice] as appropriate.

After submitting feedback, Pointless Feedback will use your application's default root_path. This means that you need to set the root inside your routes:

root :to => 'home#index'

That's it! Start your Rails server and navigate to /feedback to see a basic feedback form that users can submit.

Configuration

There are a number of configuration variables you can set in the initializer generated by rails generate pointless_feedback:install

message_topics: Defaults to ['Error on page', 'Other']. Populates the "Topic" dropdown for feedback submissions.

email_feedback: Defaults to false. If set to true will send feedback as an email.

send_from_submitter: Defaults to false. If set to true will use the submitted email address as the from address for feedback emails.

to_emails: Specifies to what addresses feedback email is sent to.

from_email: Specifies what address the feedback email is sent from.

table_name: Defaults to engine's namespace, e.g. pointless_feedback_messages. Change to any desired table for PointlessFeedback::Message model.

Customization

Pointless Feedback provides you with a simple setup that should cover most cases. However, certain things are customizable to suit your app's needs.

Views

Since Pointless Feedback is an engine, all its views are packaged inside the gem. These views will help you get started, but after some time you may want to change them. If this is the case, you just need to invoke the following generator, and it will copy all views to your application:

bundle exec rails generate pointless_feedback:views

After doing so, you will find the views at app/views/pointless_feedback/ within your application.

Note: Any url helpers used while on the feedback form page will need to prefaced with main_app.

I18n

Most of the messaging in the Pointless Feedback engine uses I18n and can be customized within your respective localization file.

To customize the flash notification upon successful submission, add the following to your config/locales/en.yml file:

pointless_feedback:
  messages:
    saved: "Thanks for your feedback!"

The error messages output defaults to the following:

activerecord:
  errors:
    header: "Invalid Fields"
    message: "Correct the following errors and try again."

To customize the subject of the feedback email, add the following to your config/locales/en.yml file as well:

pointless_feedback:
  email:
    subject: "Pointless Feedback"

Controllers

You can overwrite after_message_create_path in your ApplicationController to customize your redirect hook.

Development

Clone the repo: git clone git://github.com/vigetlabs/pointless-feedback.git
Install dependencies: bundle install
Setup databases: bundle exec rake db:migrate && rake app:db:test:prepare
Run the test suite: bundle exec rake test
Make your changes in a feature branch
Make sure the test suite passes before submitting a Pull Request