Opinio

Description

Opinio is an engine used to add comments behaviour to your application. The engine is designed to work only with *Rails 3*

Intallation

Simply add the following line to your Gemfile:

gem "opinio"

and run:

bundle

Documentation

Rdocs here:

http://rubydoc.info/github/Draiken/opinio/master/frames

Usage

Opinio provides generators to facilitate it’s usage. The most common way to quickly get Opinio working is:

rails g opinio:install comment

This will generate the Comment model, migration and also generate the opinio initializer for customization of the engine. A ‘opinio_model` will be added on the `routes.rb`. This method adds the default urls for the model that will acts as the comment

In order to add the comments functionallity to a model, you use the opinio_subjectum method

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  opinio_subjectum
end

On the ‘routes.rb` you should simply add an `opinio` for your resource that will have comments

resources :posts do
  opinio
end

If you want to display the comments for the item outside of the resource, you can simply add this to your views:

<%= comments_for @post %>

And there you go, you can now comment in your post.

Alternatively you can render just the comments or just the form like this:

<%= render_comments @post %>
<%= render_comments_form @post %>

If you need to render the comments with a specific page or limit you can use Kaminari’s configurations like ‘paginates_per 10` on your comment model or you can customize it for specific views on the helpers

<%= render_comments @post, :page => params[:page], :limit => 5 %>

This can also be used on the ‘comments_for` helper.

Customization

Views

Of course you will want to customize how the comments are displayed or any other customization to the view. To generate the view files on your application, run:

rails g opinio:views

And you can customize all the views used by the engine.

Behaviour

Pretty Urls

Often times you will want the engine to show the index of comments for a specific item without having to pass :commentable_type or :commentable_id.

In order to do that, opinio provides a method to ActionController::Base:

opinio_identifier do |params|
  next Review.find(params[:review_id]) if params[:review_id]
  next Product.find(params[:product_id]) if params[:product_id]
end

Note: you use next instead of return because it is a proc that will be executed later on, and you cannot return on procs

Basically on this method you receive the params variable and you tell the engine, who owns the comments from that page. This allows you to use routes like:

/products/1/comments
/products/1/reviews/1/comments

Without passing those 2 parameters. I suggest you put this method on the ApplicationController

Customize destroy conditions

By default, anyone can destroy any comment in the engine. We don’t want that. To setup a custom destroy condition we can use the methods provided by opinio in our controllers. For instance, if our opinio model is called ‘comment’ it would be like this:

comment_destroy_conditions do |comment|
  comment.owner == current_user
end

This would make users only be able to remove their own comments. Another example would be using the CanCan:

comment_destroy_conditions do |comment|
  authorize :destroy, comment
end

You get the picture, you’re inside your controller’s methods on that block so you can call anything your normal controllers call on actions.

Testing

Opinio provides a few shared examples for testing of your model with rspec On your opinio model test case you can require opinio’s shared examples and use them

require 'opinio/shared_examples'

describe Comment do
  it_should_behave_like :opinio
end

describe Post do
  it_should_behave_like :opinio_subjectum
end

Contribution

If you want to help in any way with Opinio please message me or fork the project, make the changes and send me a pull request. For issues please use the github issues tracker

TODO

* Haml views
* Better controller overriding (coding and documentation)
* Support for deeper levels of replies
* Refactor the `comments_for` helper
* Extract documentation to wiki