blog_basic

blog_basic is a fork of the rails plugin BlogKit (https://github.com/ryanstout/blog_kit)

blog_basic

BlogKitty is a rails plugin to add a blog to your application. The goal is to provide common blog functionality that integrates into your existing app while keeping things simple.

BlogKitty has the following features.

  • Admin for Blog Articles
  • Search engine friendly urls
  • Uses existing user model
  • Comments via existing user model
  • Uses your existing layouts
  • Easily customizable css
  • Akismet (spam filtering) Support
  • Markdown (default) or just plain html parsing
  • Image and Gravatar support
  • Anonymous Comments (optional)
  • Atom Feeds
  • Tags
  • Image upload (via paperclip, or something that adds has_attached_file to models)

Install for Rails3

Add blog_basic to your Gemfile

gem 'blog_basic'

then run "bundle install" to make sure you are up to date. Install blog_basic my running the generator blog_basic:install

rails g blog_basic:install

and migrate your database

rake db:migrate

edit config/initializers/blog_omniauth.rb and config/blog_basic.yml

Now adjust config/routes.rb for your desired path and config/blog_basic.yml for the rest of the configuration

Assumptions

Blog_basic makes the following assumptions

  • flash messages displaying is handled via the layout

Setup

BlogKit is designed to work with your existing user model, at the moment, it assumes this will be called User. Your User class and application controller simply need to respond to some methods to be able to use BlogKit. These methods, while not standardized are very common, and come with plugins like Authlogic and restful_authentication.

ApplicationController should respond to: #require_user #current_user #title - (optional passes in the pages title as the first argument)

User model should respond to: #admin? - returns true if the user can edit posts and delete comments #name - the users name #blog_image_url (optional, the users photo, show next to comments/posts) #email (options - for gravatar support)

Once you have everything setup, you can see and manage the blog at /blog_posts Make sure that you have all of the requirements below met.

Rails 3 is supported via the rails3 branch, if you are using legacy routing, you may need to copy in routes from config/routes.rb to your main routes.rb file.

To be able to use the delete links on posts, you will need to add the following to the top of your layout:

<%= csrf_meta_tag %>

Also be sure that you have the proper javascript handling code for link_to '', :method => destroy

Requirements

Rails 3.x

  • Will_Paginate

Optional:

Customization

Be sure to edit config/blog_kit.yml, many common settings can be changed there.

** View Customization **

BlogKit is built as a rails engine plugin (for rails 2.3.x, not the previous engines plugin). You can see the models, views, and controllers in vendor/plugins/blog_kit/app/ You can change them by copying any of them into your apps /app directory. Rails will look in /app before looking in vendor/plugins/blog_kit/app/ Once they are copied into /app, you can customize the appearance/behavior of the blog pages.

Troubleshooting

Q. Creating a blog post does not work, it instead renders the index page. A. Make sure you aren't using the old style default routes in rails (match '/:controller(/:action(/:id))') If you are using default routes, then simply copy the following into your routes.rb file before the default route

resources :blog_posts do
    resources :blog_comments
    resources :blog_images

    collection do
        get :drafts
    end

    member do
        get :tag
    end
end

Tag List

By default, the layout does not display a list of all tags. This can be easily added to any layout in the application by including this in the controller:

helper :blog

Then in the view:

<%= blog_tags_list %>

You can optionally pass in a limit on the number of tags to show.

Also keep in mind that you can specify a layout just for the blog kit pages.

Titles

You can have blog_kit set the page title, just create a method in application_helper like:

def title(ttl)
    @page_title = ttl
end

If anyone knows of a better convention for this, let me know. This is what nifty_generators uses

Code Highlighting Example

To get code highlighted, place the following tag:

<code lang="ruby">

</code>

You can find a list of languages (syntaxes) under doc/SYNTAXES and a list of themes (colors) under doc/THEMES

Copyright (c) 2010 Ryan Stout, released under the MIT license