BlogKit is a rails plugin to add a blog to your app. The goal is to provide common blog functionality that integrates into your existing app while keeping things simple.
BlogKit has the following features.
- Admin for Blog Articles
- Search engine friendly urls
- Uses existing user model
- Comments via existing user model
- Highlights code (with ultraviolet)
- Uses your existing layouts
- Easily customizable css
- Akismet (spam filtering) Support
- Markdown (default) or just plain html parsing
- Image and Gravatar support
- Anonymous Comments (optional)
- Atom Feeds
- Tags
- Image upload (via paperclip, or something that adds has_attached_file to models)
- S3 Image support
Coming Soon:
- Follow comments (via e-mail)
in rails:
./script/plugin install git://github.com/ryanstout/blog_kit.git
The plugin will then copy in migrations for the BlogPost and BlogComment models. Install the tables with:
rake db:migrate
The blog_kit configuration file will be installed in config/blog_kit.yml, you can enable and disable features there.
An editable CSS file for the blog pages will be copied into public/stylesheets/blog_kit.css
CSS files for the code highlighter will be copied into public/stylesheets/syntax/
Then you will want to make sure your app meets the setup requirements below.
BlogKit makes the following assumptions
- flash messages displaying is handled via the layout
BlogKit is designed to work with your existing user model, at the moment, it assumes this will be called User. Your User class and application controller simply need to respond to some methods to be able to use BlogKit. These methods, while not standardized are very common, and come with plugins like Authlogic and restful_authentication.
ApplicationController should respond to: #require_user #current_user #title - (optional passes in the pages title as the first argument)
User model should respond to: #admin? - returns true if the user can edit posts and delete comments #name - the users name #blog_image_url (optional, the users photo, show next to comments/posts) #email (options - for gravatar support)
Once you have everything setup, you can see and manage the blog at /blog_posts Make sure that you have all of the requirements below met.
Rails 2.3.x (Rails 3 support coming soon)
- Will_Paginate
Optional:
-
Ultraviolet (and its deps, for code highlighting)
Install Oniguruma if 1.8.x http://www.geocities.jp/kosako3/oniguruma/
config.gem 'ultraviolet'
-
BlueCloth 2 (for markdown)
config.gem 'bluecloth'
-
Paperclip
config.gem 'paperclip', :source => 'http://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip.git'
Rails 3 is supported, see rails3 branch
Be sure to edit config/blog_kit.yml, many common settings can be changed there.
** View Customization **
BlogKit is built as a rails engine plugin (for rails 2.3.x, not the previous engines plugin). You can see the models, views, and controllers in vendor/plugins/blog_kit/app/ You can change them by copying any of them into your apps /app directory. Rails will look in /app before looking in vendor/plugins/blog_kit/app/ Once they are copied into /app, you can customize the appearance/behavior of the blog pages.
By default, the layout does not display a list of all tags. This can be easily added to any layout in the application by including this in the controller:
helper :blog
Then in the view:
<%= blog_tags_list %>
You can optionally pass in a limit on the number of tags to show.
Also keep in mind that you can specify a layout just for the blog kit pages.
You can have blog_kit set the page title, just create a method in application_helper like:
def title(ttl)
@page_title = ttl
end
If anyone knows of a better convention for this, let me know. This is what nifty_generators uses
To get code highlighted, place the following tag:
<code lang="ruby">
</code>
You can find a list of languages (syntaxes) under doc/SYNTAXES and a list of themes (colors) under doc/THEMES
Copyright (c) 2010 Ryan Stout, released under the MIT license