Overview

Allows for comments to be easily added to different models.

License

Copyright © 2009 Brooke Kuhlmann of Berserk Technologies. See the included LICENSE for more info.

History

See the CHANGELOG file for more info.

Requirements

  1. Ruby on Rails.

Installation

Type the following from the command line to install:

  • UNIX: sudo gem install aeonscope-acts_as_commentable

  • Windows: gem install aeonscope-acts_as_commentable

Update your environment.rb file to include the new gem:

  • config.gem “aeonscope-acts_as_commentable”, :lib => “acts_as_commentable”, :source => “gems.github.com”

Usage

Assuming you have created Post and Comment migrations and models, for example, then you can modify your models as follows:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Behaviors
  acts_as_commentable
end

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Behaviors
  acts_as_comment 
end

That’s it, your done!

As an added bonus, you can customize your comment behavior. For example, lets say you want your comment label to reflect your post label (assuming you have “label” columns for both your Post and Comment models). You could then specify the auto_label method to be called before you save a comment. Like so:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Behaviors
  acts_as_comment

  # Callbacks
  before_save :auto_label
 end

So if you created a post with a “My Awesome Post” label, then your comment label would end up as “RE: My Awesome Post” label in order to preserve comment context.

What’s that you say? You don’t use “label” columns for your Post and Comment models? No problem, you can change the default behavior as follows:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  # Behaviors
  acts_as_comment :commentable_label => "title", :comment_label => "title"

  # Callbacks
  before_save :auto_label
end

Now you are using “title” instead “label” columns. To be clear, the “commentable_label” defines the Post model setting, while the “comment_label” defines the Comment model setting.

Migrations

Based on the Post and Comment models mentioned above, the following migration code might be of interest:

# Post Migration
class CreatePosts < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :posts do |t|
      t.string :name
      t.string :label
      t.text :content
      t.string :visibility
      t.datetime :published_at
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :posts
  end
end

# Comment Migration
class CreateComments < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    create_table :comments do |t|
      t.integer :commentable_id
      t.string :commentable_type
      t.string :label
      t.text :content
      t.timestamps
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :comments
  end
end

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