SuperSlug

SuperSlug handles automatic generation of slugs (permalinks) for your rails models

Installation

This gem is meant to work with Ruby on Rails projects. I recommend you add it to your project's Gemfile:

gem 'superslug'

Then install your bundle:

$ bundle

Usage

All you need are two columns on an Active Record model. I use title and slug by default, but you can use whatever you want.

Note: It's always faster to use string columns unless you absolutely have to use text.

When you have your columns, just add the has_superslug method into your model.

has_superslug(source = :title, dest = :slug, options = {})

The source column is the column from which you want to generate the slug, while the destination (dest) column is where the sluggified string is stored.

Options

separator: Defines the character with which to fill blank spaces in the string. For example, if it is a hyphen, then Hello World becomes hello- world. See below for an example.
force_update: If true, the destination column (slug) will always be set when the record is saved. Otherwise, it doesn't change once it is first created, unless manually set.
context: If you pass a symbol of a belongs_to relationship, the slug will only need to be unique within the association.

Example

If you have a Page model that has a name and a permalink column, and you want to use underscore separators, and only force the page slug to be unique within a category, then your model would look like this:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :category
  has_superslug :name, :permalink, :separator => '_', :context => :category
end

Query Helpers

When you add the has_superslug method to your model, you also get a couple helpers.

First, SuperSlug assumes you are doing this to make friendly URLs, so it adds a to_param method and uses your destination column for the parameter. Rails uses the id attribute by default.

And second, the find method on an Active Record class using SuperSlug checks for the slug first. Using the example above, if you ran Page.find('hello- world'), it would check for pages with permalink matching hello-world, and not the ID (which is the default).

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/cambium/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create a new Pull Request