BlogKit

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)

Install

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.

Assumptions

BlogKit makes the following assumptions

flash messages displaying is handled via the layout

Setup

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.

Requirements

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

Rails 3 is supported, see rails3 branch

Customization

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.

Tag List

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.

Titles

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

Code Highlighting Example

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