Content Directory

Content Directory is a lightweight replacement of Content Management System. It provides structure for text based content. It comes with a parser, which allows content entries to have metadata and rich formatting.

Structure

Content Directory does not require a database. Instead, it uses file system. An entry is a file written in Markdown syntax (with one of the following extensions: .md, .markdown, .txt, .text). You can group related entries in a folder.

- content
  - home
    - main.md
    - features
      - collaboration.md
      - manage.md
  - posts
    - a-new-blog.md
    - sortable-stars.md

Writing entries

Entry uses Markdown syntax, but there is an additional rule that every entry must have a metadata declaration on the top. Metadata declaration block uses YAML syntax.

Title: Introduction
Date: 2013/03/10
Tags: ["post", "short"]

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking
thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an
effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the
glass doors of *Victory Mansions*, though not quickly enough to
prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. 

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end
of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been
tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an **enormous** face,
more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five,
with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features.

Reading entries

Once you have written entries, you can use ContentDirectory.find to get the processed entries and render them into views.

ContentDirectory.find returns a Hash of ContentDirectory::Entry. It accepts one argument, which is a path relative to ContentDirectory.root. If path is not specified, ContentDirectory.find will find all possible entries.

posts = ContentDirectory.find "posts"

You can use metadata to sort posts by date

posts = ContentDirectory.find("posts").values
posts.sort_by! { |post| post.metadata["Date"] }

Entry has three important values: metadata, text, html.

  1. metadata is a Hash of parsed metadata block from entry file.
  2. text is a String of original entry text.
  3. html is a String of the result of original text after processed by Redcarpet Markdown parser.

You can you these three values to render entry to a view.

for post in posts
  puts post.metadata["Title"]
  puts post.text
  puts post.html
end

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem "content_directory"

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install content_directory

Configuration

ContentDirectory.root is default to "#{Rails.root}/content" when used in Rails. If you want to use other directory, you can easily change it in the initializer.

ContentDirectory.root = "path/to/content"

Use with Rails

Content Directory is intended to be used in Rails to extract content from view templates. In this fashion, content can be easily reused and queried.

  1. Create content directory in Rails root path.
  2. Write entries in this directory.
  3. Use ContentDirectory.find in the controllers.
  4. Render entry html or text in the templates.

Test

rake test

Contributing

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  5. Create new Pull Request