ComfyBlog is a simple blog management engine for the ComfortableMexicanLoveseat gem we use at Hitfox. The loveseat gem was inspired by and built on top of ComfortableMexicanSofa.
- If you already have a project setup through
foxinator-generator, please skip to Installation
- The blogging engine depends on the CMS to be setup with foxinator and loveseat gems
- So if you don't already have these included in your project's Gemfile, add them as follows:
gem 'comfortable_mexican_loveseat' gem 'foxinator-generator', git: '[email protected]:HitFox/foxinator-generator.git'
- If you haven't run the foxinator setup command, run
rails g foxinator:setupand follow all of the steps outlined here.
- Ability to set up one blog per site
- User defined layout per blog
- Ability to add categories and authors
- Filtering blog posts by category and author on the front end
- SEO optimization for each blog post
Add gem definition to your Gemfile:
gem 'comfy_blog',
git: '[email protected]:HitFox/comfy-blog.git',
tag: 'v1.14.0'
As mentioned above, the blog depends on our loveseat gem, so if you don't have the loveseat and foxinator gems, please include them in your project's Gemfile:
Then from the Rails project's root run:
bundle install
rails generate comfy:blog
rake db:migrate
Add these lines in your config/routes.rb file:
comfy_route :blog_admin, :path => 'admin'
comfy_route :blog, :path => 'blog'
NOTE: Depending on the setup of your app, you need to know where these routes should be placed. If you have a required locale: scope, it should go on the bottom of the scope. If you have one language for your site, but still have a locale scope, you have to make it optional and set a default like so: scope '(:locale)', defaults: { locale: "en" } do ... end. When you put the above two lines within the scope now, you can have the blog under mysite.com/blog instead of mysite.com/en/blog.
Add the following conditional within the <head> tag in your application layout file (written in haml, can be easily converted to regular erb):
- if content_for?(:blog_seo_data)
= content_for(:blog_seo_data)
- elsif @cms_page.present?
= comfy_seo_tags
- If you have any other meta or SEO tags, wrap them in a
unless content_for?(:blog_seo_data)conditional, to make sure the SEO data added for blog posts takes precedence. Looking for better alternatives to this, all suggestions are welcome!
If you don't have an admin user set up already, run rake admins:create && rake admins:permit.
When you login into localhost:3000/en/admin, make sure to click the "Sync" button to see the 'Blogs' section within the admin panel, under Sites.
Important: When creating a blog in the CMS admin panel, make sure to leave the 'Path' field blank.
You should also find view templates in /app/views/comfy/blog folder. Feel free to adjust them as you see fit.
If you want to use something other than our default comment form on the blog posts, you can remove the bottom part of the /views/comfy/blog/posts/show.html.haml that has to do with the comments. Also, you can delete the views/comfy/blog/comments directory.
- You can adjust how many blogs posts show up on one page by editing the
config.posts_per_pageoption, in theconfig/intializers/comfy_blog.rbfile that's generated in your application.
- The original gem doesn't support multilingual blogs. Also, multiple blogs per site won't work correctly. If you have multiple sites, more than one language or need more than one blog, it will take some hacking of the routes and comfy controllers (e.g.
Comfy::Cms::BaseController) to get that working. AppLift could be used as an example. - SEO data will not work for the blog home page, unless there is at least one page created under the Sites tab in the CMS. The SEO logic only works for the blog posts pages.
- It seems as though when you create more than one blog for a site, the blog lookup gets messed up. So if there is one blog per site, then everything works correctly (which has been the use case every time we've used the original verison of the gem).
- Change dependency on Comfortable Mexican Loveseat to be a minimum version
- New feature: A blog post can have a thumbnail that can be seen on the blogs posts index page
- Update loveseat dependency version, to make sure everything works with foxinator in the Gemfile
- Fix minor bugs
- Fix wrong translation keys
- Make sure there is full test coverage of new features
- Add missing translations
- Fix broken tests and clean up views
- Update test fixtures and make sure tests are runnable
- Add asterisks to required blog module fields
- Update instructions and limitations
- Added the ability to manage blog categories in the backend. Can tie blog posts to multiple categories and added a category filter on the front end for blog posts.
- Added the ability to add authors to be used for blog posts in the back end. Added an author filter on the front end for blog posts as well.
- Ability to customize SEO tags for individual blog posts has been added. See SEO limitations above.
Copyright 2009-2014 Oleg Khabarov