Refinery Settings was extracted from Refinery CMS just before 2.0.0 was released and can now be used separately.
Add the gem to you Gemfile:
gem 'refinerycms-settings'
Generate and install the necessary migrations:
rails generate refinery:settings
rake db:migrate
Settings can be really useful, especially when you have custom display logic or new plugins that need to behave in different ways.
To best explain how settings work, let's use an example. Say you have a client who has a display in a local trade show every year and 2 months before the trade show, they want to display a little banner in the header of all pages.
Once the trade show is finished, the client needs to be able to hide it again
until next year. This is what your application.html.erb file might look like:
...
<div id='header'>
<h1>My Company</h1>
<% if ::Refinery::Setting.find_or_set(:show_trade_show_banner, false) %>
<%= image_tag ('trade-show-banner.jpg') %>
<% end %>
</div>
...
The following will automatically create a new Refinery setting called
"show_trade_show_banner" and set its default to false.
If that setting already exists, it just reads in what the current value is.
So as you can see, this is quite clever because you can quickly define new settings and their defaults right from the view as you need them.
This setting would then show up in the backend in the 'Settings' area where the client could change the value as their trade show approaches. Easy as pie!
limit = Refinery::Setting.find_or_set(:list_limit, 20)