Comfortable Mexican Sofa (MicroCMS)

ComfortableMexicanSofa is a tiny and powerful micro CMS for your Rails 3 application. This CMS is a plugin for your application, not the other way around. Implemented as an Engine so installation is no different than for any other plugin out there.

Installation

Add gem definition to your Gemfile:

gem 'comfortable_mexican_sofa'

Then from the Rails project's root run:

bundle install
rails g cms
rake db:migrate

When upgrading to a newer version just run rails g cms and replace files when prompted. You may also need to run rake db:migrate again.

Usage

After finishing installation you should be able to navigate to http://yoursite/cms-admin

Default username and password is 'username' and 'password'. You probably want to change it right away. Admin credentials (among other things) can be found and changed in the cms initializer: /config/initializers/comfortable_mexican_sofa.rb

Before creating pages and populating them with content we need to create a layout. A layout is the template of your pages; it defines some reusable content (like header and footer, for example) and places where the content goes. A very simple layout can look like this:

<html>
  <body>
    <h1>{{ cms:page:header:string }}</h1>
    {{ cms:page:content:text }}
  </body>
</html>

Once you have a layout, you may start creating pages and populating content. It's that easy.

CMS Tags

There are a number of cms tags that define where the content goes and how it's populated. Page and Field tags are used during layout creation. Snippet, Helper and Partial tags can be peppered pretty much anywhere. Tag is structured like so:

{{ cms:page:content:text }}
    \    \     \      \ 
     \    \     \      ‾ tag format or extra attributes
      \    \     ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ label/slug/path for the tag, 
       \    ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ tag type (page, field, snippet, helper, partial)
        ‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾‾ cms tag identifier

Here's a number of tag variations:

# Page tags are pieces of text content that will get rendered on the page. Format defines how form field
# gets rendered in the page editing/creation section of the admin area.

{{ cms:page:some_label:text }}
{{ cms:page:some_label }}             # shorthand for above. 'text' is default format for pages
{{ cms:page:some_label:string }}      # in admin area text field is displayed instead of textarea
{{ cms:page:some_label:datetime }}    # similarly, datetime widget in the admin area
{{ cms:page:some_label:integer }}     # a number field
{{ cms:page:some_label:rich_text }}   # TinyMCE wysiwyg editor will be used to edit this content

# Field tags are pieces of text content that are NOT rendered on the page. They can be accessed via
# your application's layout / helpers / partials etc. Useful for populating this like <meta> tags.
# Field formats are exactly the same as for Page tags.

{{ cms:field:some_label:string }}
{{ cms:field:some_label }}            # same as above. 'string' is default format for fields

# Snippet tags are bits or reusable content that can be used anywhere. Imagine creating content like
# a sharing widget, or business address that you want to randomly use across your site.

{{ cms:snippet:some_label }}

# Helper is a wrapper for your regular helpers. Normally you cannot have IRB in CMS content, so there are
# tags that allow calling helpers and partials.

{{ cms:helper:method_name }}          # same as <%= method_name() %>
{{ cms:helper:method_name:x:y:z }}    # same as <%= method_name('x', 'y', 'z') %>

# Partial tags are wrappers just like above helper ones.

{{ cms:partial:path/to/partial }}     # same as <%= render :partial => 'path/to/partial' %>
{{ cms:partial:path/to/partial:a:b }} # same as <%= render :partial => 'path/to/partial',
                                      #   :locals => { :param_1 => 'a', :param_1 => 'b' } %>

Multiple Sites

Sofa is able to manage multiple sites from the same application. For instance: 'site-a.example.com' and 'site-b.example.com' will have distinct set of layouts, pages, snippets, etc. To enable multi-site functionality make sure you have this setting in the initializer: config.auto_manage_sites = false. When this setting is set to true, Sofa assumes there's only one site and will manage hostname associated with it automatically.

Integrating CMS with your app

Comfortable Mexican Sofa is a plugin, so it allows you to easily access content it manages. Here's some things you can do.

You can use your existing application layout. When creating CMS layouts there's an option to use an application layout. Suddenly all CMS pages using that layout will be rendered through <%= yield %> of your application layout.

You can use CMS pages as regular views:

def show
  @dinosaur = Dinosaur.find(params[:id])
  # CMS page probably should have either helper or partial tag to display @dinosaur details
  render :cms_page => '/dinosaur
end

Actually, you don't need to explicitly render a CMS page like that. Sofa will try to rescue a TemplateNotFound by providing a matching CMS page.

You can access Page or Field tag content directly from your application (layouts/helpers/partials) via cms_page_content method. This is how you can pull things like meta tags into your application layout.

# if @cms_page is available (meaning Sofa is doing the rendering)
cms_page_content(:page_or_field_label)

# anywhere else
cms_page_content(:page_or_field_label, CmsPage.find_by_slug(...))

Similarly you can access Snippet content:

cms_snippet_content(:snippet_slug)

Extending Admin Area

If you wish, you can re-use Sofa's admin area for things you need to administer in your application. To do this, first you will need to make your admin controllers to inherit from CmsAdmin::BaseController. This way, your admin views will be using Sofa's admin layout and it's basic HttpAuth.

class Admin::CategoriesController < CmsAdmin::BaseController
  # your code goes here
end

From your views you can use cms_form_for method to re-use Sofa's FormBuilder. There are also some existing styles for tables, will_paginate helpers, etc. Take a look in /public/stylesheets/comfortable_mexican_sofa/content.css

You will probably want to add a navigation link on the left side, and for that you will want to use ViewHook functionality. Create a partial that has a link to your admin area and declare in in Sofa's initializer: ComfortableMexicanSofa::ViewHooks.add(:navigation, '/admin/navigation'). Similarly you can add extra stylesheets, etc into admin area in the same way.

Do you have other authentication system in place (like Devise, AuthLogic, etc) and wish to use that? For that, you will need to create a module that does the authentication check and make Comfortable Mexican Sofa use it. For example:

module CmsDeviseAuth
  def authenticate
    unless current_user && current_user.admin?
      redirect_to new_user_session_path
    end
  end
end

You can put this module in /config/initializers/comfortable_mexican_sofa.rb and change authentication method: config.authentication = 'CmsDeviseAuth'. Now to access Sofa's admin area users will be authenticated against your existing authentication system.

Working with seeds

Comfortable Mexican Sofa has seeds, functionality that helps manage content during development phase. It's very different from Rails seeds as Sofa's seeds are loaded with each page load. The database is completely bypassed when seeds are active. This way, you can source-control content before going live, disabling seeds and dumping everything into the database.

First, you will need to set a path where fixture files will be found (inside Sofa's initializer):

if Rails.env.development? || Rails.env.test?
  ComfortableMexicanSofa.config.seed_data_path = File.expand_path('db/cms_seeds', Rails.root)
end

If you ran rails g cms, you should find an example set of seeds in /db/cms_seeds directory. Please note that seeds are nested in the folder that is the hostname of your site. Each file is an YAML representation of a database entry for that layout/page/snippet.

There's a rake task that makes moving seeds into database (and vice-versa) easy:

# from seeds into database
rake comfortable_mexican_sofa:import:all FROM=your-site.local TO=your-site.com SEED_PATH=/path/to/seeds

# from database to seeds    
rake comfortable_mexican_sofa:export:all FROM=your-site.com TO=your-site.local SEED_PATH=/path/to/seeds

ComfortableMexicanSofa is released under the MIT license

mrwokkel/comfortable-mexican-sofa