Governor

Governor (named after Rod Blagojevich) is the pluggable blogging platform for Rails, built for people who want to build their blog into their website, not build their website into their blog.

I’m just getting started, but feel free to poke around. I’m sure that when this starts getting functional, I’ll write some setup documentation here. And try the specs, they’re fresh!

Dependencies

ActiveRecord

By 1.0, I’d like to make it possible to use Governor with other ORMs, but I’m not sure when that’ll be.

Setting Up

Governor is a gem, so the first thing to do is to add Governor to your Gemfile.

gem 'governor'

Once you’ve installed the gem into your app, you need to run the generator:

rails generate governor:install

This will add an initializer which allows you some loose configuration of Governor. As Governor grows, the initializer will actually get some teeth. Now you’re ready to add a model:

rails generate governor:create_articles [CLASS_NAME]

‘CLASS_NAME` by default is Article, but feel free to specify something else, like Post, Blog, whatever. This will add a model, migration, and route to your app.

Usage

Now that you have an article model and a set of routes, you’re ready to plug it into your app. I’d recommend running ‘rake routes` to see what routes have been added, as they depend on the model name you chose.

The Governor initialization will check if Devise is installed, and will try to Do The Right Thing if it is. If not, it’ll yell at you, so be sure to set up your authorization rules in this file.

Authentication/Authorization

For now, Governor checks with Devise to make sure someone’s logged in before creating an article, and verifies that the logged in user is an article’s author before allowing them to edit. You might have your own rules that you’d rather apply. You’ll have to wait until a future version if you want something different, sorry.

Roadmap

Less of a roadmap as a politician’s promise of what will exist in future versions of Governor:

Strategies to play nice with different authentication/authorization schemes.
A fleshed-out Governor plugin API.
A few plugins: comments, LiveJournal synchronization, formatting engines, search, permalinks, feeds, and who knows what else.
A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage.

Until v1.0 (or at least until things start to stabilize), I won’t promise anything regarding backwards compatibility. Please let me know if something you were relying on breaks, and I’ll do my best to steer you in the right direction or repair functionality.

Contributing to Governor

Governor is just getting off the ground now, so while there’s a lot to implement, the infrastructure might be too shaky to support multiple developers. Still, if you’re interested in improving this, let’s talk.

Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet
Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it
Fork the project
Start a feature/bugfix branch
Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution
Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.
Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.