Inboxes

Inboxes is a young messaging system for Rails app. It:

  • provides 3 models for developers: Discussion, Message and Speaker
  • read/unread discussions counter
  • any user can be invited to discussion by the member of this discussion, so you can chat with unlimited number of users

Requirements and recommendations

Inboxes requires Rails 3.x and Devise for user identification (surely, messaging system is not possible without users). Now the gem is tested only with Ruby 1.8.7 and REE.

We recommend to use Inboxes with Faye, because it's really sexy with it.

Remember that unfortunately, Inboxes reserve 3 resources names: Discussion, Message and Speaker.

Installation

Make sure that Devise is already installed and configured in your app!

  1. Add gem "inboxes", "~> 0.1.2" to the Gemfile and run bundle install
  2. Execute rails generate inboxes:install. This command will generate migration for messaging system. Don't forget to run migrations: rake db:migrate
  3. Add inboxes to your User model like here
  4. Now Inboxes are ready to use. Open http://yoursite.dev/discussions to see the list of discussions. You can start new one.

Default Inboxes views are ugly, so you can copy into your app and make anything with them: rails generate inboxes:views If you have problems with installation, you can check code of demo app

I18n

By default, the gem provides localized phrases for Russian and English languages. You can easily override any of them. Here is list of all I18n phrases.

Integration with Faye

You can watch the demo of integration on YouTube

  1. Add gem "faye" to your Gemfile and run bundle install. Install Faye by the screencast

  2. Create messaging.js in app/assets/javascripts/ with these line: = require inboxes/faye

  3. Copy or replace 2 views from Inboxes example app to your application: app/views/inboxes/messages/_form and app/views/inboxes/messages/create

  4. Add config parameters to your application config (last 2 are not necessary):

config.inboxes.faye_enabled = true config.inboxes.faye_host = "inboxes-app.dev" # localhost by default config.inboxes.faye_port = 9292 # 9292 by default

  1. Faye installation is finished. If you have any troubles, check the example app

While testing Inboxes with Faye, don't forget to run it: rackup faye.ru -s thin -E production

Todo

  • Add RSpec tests

Authors

Feel free for pull requests!