A minimalist blog engine for your Ruby on Rails site.
To post content, create a file in app/views/posts with post_ as a prefix to the filename.
If you want to make a post called Hello World, you would create a file called app/views/posts/post_hello_world.html.erb and fill the file with the content of your blog post.
# app/views/posts/post_hello_world.html.erb <h1>Hello World</h1> <p>This is my first blog post using Blog Engine</p>
Any file in app/views/posts matching the pattern of post_* is considered a blog post.
Note that you can use whatever rendering engine your Rails installation supports: Erb, Haml, etc.
A default posts index view is provided, but you’ll probably want to override this. To do this you create your own app/views/posts/index.html.erb …
# app/views/posts/index.html.erb <h1>My Awesome Blog</h1> <ul> <% for post in @posts do %> <li><%= link_to post.title, post %> <%= post.updated_at %></li> <% end %> </ul>
The Post class has the following public class methods: all, find(id). The all method will return an array of Post objects, ordered by most recent post first.
Post objects have the following attributes:
path - The path of the actual post file id - The post name via the path. E.g. post_hello_world.html.erb is hello_world *title - A humanized id. *updated_at - Time the file was last updated according to File::mtime. *created_at - Time the post was created.
You can override the attributes marked with * in the meta.yml file at app/views/posts/meta.yml
The format of the file is a simple Hash of key=>value pairs indexed by the blog post id. For example …
# app/views/posts/meta.yml
---
'post1':
created_at: <%= Date.new(2010, 2, 7)
'post2':
title: Brown Beagle Software
An ATOM index is built for you automatically as part of the plugin. You can reference the ATOM feed using posts_url(:format=>‘atom’) …
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Brown Beagle Software" href="<%= posts_url(:format=>'atom') %>" >
There’s already a default posts/show action in the plugin that renders the post title, date, and content within your default layout. You can override this format easily by creating your own app/views/posts/show.html.erb
Here’s what the default app/views/posts/show.html.erb looks like …
# app/views/posts/show.html.erb
<h1><%= @post.title %></h1>
<h2><%= @post.updated_at.strftime('%d %B %Y') %></h2>
<%= render :file => 'posts/post_'+@post.id %>
There’s no support for comments, pingbacks, or trackbacks yet.
There’s also some hard coded file paths and ATOM values in there that I would like to remove eventually.
Blog Engine is maintained by Alex Pooley, and is funded by Brown Beagle Software.
Blog Engine is Copyright © 2009 Alex Pooley, Brown Beagle Software. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the MIT-LICENSE file.