Cambium

Cambium serves three main purposes in Ruby on Rails applications:

Bootstrap Rails' standard installation by performing additional setup (things I find myself doing at the beginning of every project).
Facilitate development throughout the life of any project by abstracting repeatable bits of code.
Provide a simple, but flexible CMS for those applications that require it.

For now, the documentation will be continued in the README. This will be moved out over time.

App Setup

Cambium lets you get up and running real fast. First, start you rails project as you normally would.

$ rails new my_app -d postgresql

Note: Cambium only supports PostgreSQL. If you need to use another database, I suggest you add an option into Cambium and create a pull request. However, I strongly encourage you to give PostgreSQL a try.

Add Cambium to your Gemfile.

gem 'cambium', '>= 1.0.0'

I would probably commit at this time (so it's easy to rollback if you don't like something Cambium did).

Generate Cambium's (simple) configuration file.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:install

Edit the config (config/initializers/cambium.rb) to your liking.

Then, get your PostgreSQL database configured by editing config/database.yml to your appropriate settings.

Make sure you do not commit between this step and finishing the setup process. Cambium will ignore this database.yml file, which is good, as it may contain sensitive data.

Then, create your database:

$ bundle exec rake db:create

Although optional, I suggest you at least start with the default Gemfile.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:gemfile

Remove the gems you don't want and then bundle.

$ bundle install

And now you can run Cambium's auto-setup generator.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:app

When you're done, you can migrate (and annotate), and be on your way!

$ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec annotate

Admin / CMS

Install CMS

If you want to also setup a CMS, it's as simple as running the generator.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:admin

Run the migrations Cambium created with the admin generator.

$ bundle exec rake db:migrate
$ bundle exec annotate

Make sure Cambium's engine is mounted in your config/routes.rb file.

mount Cambium::Engine => '/'

It's best to mount it at the root because Cambium automatically namespaces its routes.

At this point, you should be able to go to localhost:3000/admin and be redirected to the login page (if you are not signed in). Once you have an admin user and sign in successfully, you will be redirected to the admin dashboard.

Adding Users

We have a generator for creating a new user, which takes an --admin option if you want the user to have admin access.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:user [username] [password] [--admin / --no-admin]

Generating Admin Controllers

A big portion of Cambium's power lies in its ability to spin up feature-full CMS controllers and views in a snap.

Before you generate an admin controller, you need to make sure you have a working data model. It's best if the model already has the columns you know you're going to need (it's easy to add or remove later, but quicker if you have what you need at the beginning).

Then you can run the generator.

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:controller [model]

Be sure you are using the proper class name of the data model.

For example, if I have a Page model, this would be the command:

$ bundle exec rails g cambium:controller Page

Note: I'm working on making Cambium more powerful all the time. At the moment, it works best with simple form-type data.

The generator does a few things:

Uses the standard Rails generate to generate a template in the admin namespace (using the example, your file would be at app/controllers/admin/pages_controller.rb).
Adds a namespaced route to your routes file (config/routes.rb).
Adds the Cambium config file (at config/admin/pages.yml in this example).
Adds a generic sidebar item for your controller at config/admin/sidebar.yml.

See below for information on the sidebar and controller settings.

The sidebar in Cambium is driven by your config/admin/sidebar.yml settings file. It's pretty semantic and simple.

The default sidebar is:

dashboard:
  label: Dashboard
  route: cambium.admin_dashboard
  icon: dashboard
users:
  label: Users
  route: cambium.admin_users
  icon: users
  controllers: ['users']

The important thing to remember is you have to define a unique key for each item. For example, if you accidentally named users as dashboard, then only the last dashboard item gets rendered.

The options are:

label: Text within the sidebar link
route: Route to apply to the link (for custom settings, replace cambium with main_app)
icon: The name of the icon to use, pulled from IcoMoon's free set
controllers: An array of controllers which, if the current page is using one of the controllers, the sidebar item will be highlighted (with an active class)

Controller Settings

The controller settings are what drive the behavior of Cambium. And it's why, for simple models, you don't have to add any code to your controller and you don't need any views.

Each controller's settings file is named for that controller, and can be found in config/admin. For example, the users controller settings are at config/admin/users.yml.

Here is the default set for the users controller:

model: User
table:
  title: Site Users
  scope: all
  columns:
    email:
      heading: Email
  buttons:
    new: New User
export:
  button: Export Users
  columns:
    name:
      label: Name
    email:
      label: Email
form:
  buttons:
    delete: Delete User
  new: &new
    title: New User
    fields:
      name:
        type: string
      email:
        type: string
        readonly: true
      password:
        type: password
      password_confirmation:
        type: password
  edit:
    <<: *new
    title: Edit User

Every setting plays a role. Let's step through each one.

model: The name (with class case) of the model to be used for this controller
table:title: The title to show on the controller's index view.
table:scope: The scope method to run on the model. Most of the time this will be all, but maybe you need to order, limit, or filter your results. You need to do this through an ActiveRecord Scope
table:columns:[column]: Each column gets its own unique key, which distinguishes it from others
table:columns:[column]:heading: The label for the column in the data table.
table:buttons:new: Label for the "New" button. If you don't want a new button, remove this setting.
export: This section handles an export option for your data table. Remove it if you don't want to offer that.
export:button: The label for the export button.
export:columns:[column]: Each column in the exported file gets its own unique key, which distinguishes it from others
export:columns:[column]:label: The heading in the exported file for that column.
export:columns:[column]:output: An optional method you can pass to each object to help with display.
form: Settings for the form.
form:buttons:delete: Label for the delete button. If you remove delete entirely, then no delete button will exist (though you'd have to manually remove the route from your routes file).
form:[new/edit]: New is the defaut, and most of the time Edit will inherit from new (the <<: *new is what handles that). But you can optionally override new values for your edit form.
form:[new/edit]:title: Title for the form page.
form:[new/edit]:fields:[field]: Each form field gets its own unique key to set it apart from the others.
form:[new/edit]:fields:[field]:type: The type of the HTML field to render, which uses SimpleForm. You can use heading here to break up your fields.
form:[new/edit]:fields:[field]:readonly: If set to true, it will add the readonly attribute to the input field. Not supported for markdown fields.

Note: Aside from the usual form field types, Cambium uses Mark It Zero! to render markdown editors. You can pass markdown as the type option and it will give you a markdown editor.

Overriding the Base Controller

I've rearranged Cambium's CMS controllers so there is a blank BaseController from which it inherits. You can manually override this in your app by creating a Cambium::BaseController and loading the appropriate files.

First, generate the controller.

$ bundle exec rails g controller cambium/base

That controller can inherit from any other controller in your app. The only thing you need to ensure is that it loads the CambiumHelper from the Cambium namespace. So, the base file should look like this:

class Cambium::BaseController < ApplicationController
  helper Cambium::CambiumHelper
end

You can change ApplicationController to any other controller in your application.

Model Options

Cambium makes use of many gems, and uses the behavior of those gems to drive much of its power. In many cases, this requires added options to your model.

Searchable Models

To make items searchable (in the CMS and in the app), we use pg_search. You need to include the PgSearch module, and then call out the columns you want to search.

For example, if you have a Page model and you want title and body to be searchable, you're model might look like this:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  include PgSearch
  multisearchable :against => [:title, :body]
end

Activity Log

If you want to track the history of a model's records (which also means adding it to the activity log in the CMS), you need to add has_paper_trail to your model.

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_paper_trail
end

The activity log in particular makes use of the to_s method for the model. In this way, we make no assumptions about the default attribute that describes a model's record. Usually this is something like title or name. If it were title, then your model (from above) is:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_paper_trail

  def to_s
    title
  end
end

Markdown to HTML

As mentioned above, Cambium uses Mark It Zero! to render markdown editors. You, therefore, also have the option to store a markdown text attribute and have it automatically converted to HTML using the after_save callback.

If, for our Page example, you have body_markdown and body_html fields, you can add your body_markdown attribute to the form and then the following to your model:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  converts_markdown :body_markdown, :body_html
end

See this section of the Mark It Zero! docs for more information and options.

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/cambium/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request