Shakespeare

Shakespeare is a Ruby on Rails content manager plugin.

Shakespeare allows:

• User-editable page titles, descriptions, meta info and content blocks for dynamic requests
• User editable content-only pages

Shakespeare is a super simple bolt-on CMS for any Rails app.

Installation

Shakespeare is easy to install.

As a plugin:

./script/plugin install git://github.com/paulca/shakespeare.git

Or as a gem. Add this to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'shakespeare'

Then generate the migration to create the pages table:

./script/generate shakespeare

And run the migration:

rake db:migrate

Basic Usage

Once Shakespeare is installed, every controller action can now have its own content. You an access this content in the controller or the view with the page_content method.

View Helpers

In your views, you have access to a number of helpers for generating your page meta-data.

• page_title is the title of the page
• keywords_meta_tag generates a tag for the page keywords, or returns nil if it's left blank
• description_meta_tag generates a tag for the page description, or returns nil if it's left blank
• robots_meta_tag generates a tag for the robots no-index and/or nofollow meta tag options, or returns nil if it's left blank
• canonical_link_tag generates a tag with the canonical URL for the page, if enable_canonical is set to true

You also get access to route helpers:

• admin_pages_path and admin_pages_url point to the pages admin interface

Web Interface

Using Rails' Engines feature, Shakespeare comes with a web interface that is available to your app straight away at http://localhost:3000/admin/pages.

By default, this comes with no styling, but you can create a layout in app/layouts/admin.html.erb, or set a layout by setting Shakespare::Settings.layout

For example, to use your standard application layout, create a config/initializers/shakespeare.rb like this:

Shakespeare::Settings.layout = 'application'

You can also add before_filters to protect the controller from outsiders:

Shakespeare::Settings.before_filters << 'require_admin_user'

By default, in production, if Shakespeare::Settings.before_filters is empty, /admin/pages is protected. You can disable this protection by setting Behavior::Settings.allow_anonymous to true.

Format Method

By default, pages can be accessed at "http://localhost:3000/pages/URL" ... @page.content is formatted with Rails's simple_format helper.

You can choose not to format it with:

Shakespeare::Settings.format_method = nil

Or a choice of your own:

Shakespeare::Settings.format_method = 'textilize'

Running the tests

You can run the tests by checking out the code into vendor/plugins of a Rails app and running:

rake

It also comes with a set of cucumber features:

cucumber

About me

I'm Paul Campbell. I'm an avid Ruby on Rails web developer. Follow my ramblings at http://www.pabcas.com

Follow me on Twitter http://twitter.com/paulca

Copyright (c) 2009 Paul Campbell, released under the MIT license