GitHub - galfert/headliner: DRY up your page titles

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=========
Headliner
=========

Headliner DRYs up your page titles.


Background
==========

Normally, if your Rails application has lots of actions and a shared
layout, you might find yourself setting custom page title names in your
controllers.

Here's an example:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  def about
    @title = "About us"
  end
end

Then, in your main layout, you might have something like this:

<head>
<title>My website<% if @title %>: <%= @title %><% end %></title>
</head

This works okay... but page titles don't really belong in controllers, do
they?

So, by moving these titles into your views, we can DRY things up a bit and
reinforce the MVC design pattern that's so fundamental to Ruby on Rails.


Usage
=====

First, add this code to your main layout:

<head>
<%= title :site => "My website" %>
</head>

Then, to set the page title, add this to each of your views:

<h1><%= title "My page title" %></h1>

When views are rendered, the page title will be included in the right
spots:

<head>
<title>My website | My page title</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>My page title</h1>
</body>


Options
=======

Use these options to customize the title format:

:prefix (text between site name and separator)
:separator (text used to separate website name from page title)
:suffix (text between separator and page title)
:lowercase (when true, the page name will be lowercase)
:reverse (when true, the page and site names will be reversed)

And here are a few examples to give you ideas.

<%= title :separator => "&mdash;" %>
<%= title :prefix => false, :separator => ":" %>
<%= title :lowercase => true %>
<%= title :reverse => true, :prefix => false %>


Dealing with special pages
==========================

How do you set the page title without showing it in the view?

<% title "My page title" %>

What if your view headline is different from your page title?

<%= title "My page title", "My headline" %>



How does it work?
=================

Ruby on Rails renders actions *before* inserting them into layouts. So, if 
you set a variable in your view, it will be accessible in your layout. But, 
at first glance, it looks like you're using a variable (in the head)
before it's been assigned a value (in the body). Cool, huh?


Credits
=======

Special thanks to Nick Zadrozny and Jordan Fowler for their input.


Feedback
========

Comments, bug reports, and svn diffs welcome at http://the.railsi.st.