unwwwritten

Bend it to your will

Posted September 8th, 2007 at 5:08 am EDT by S. Brent Faulkner — View Comments

So, you've found an open source Ruby on Rails application that your think does something you need (say a weblog application). You install it on your server (or shared hosting environment) and you're generally quite happy with the way it works, but...

There's always a but isn't there?

I installed SimpleLog a little while ago, and for the most part it does it's job. It's simple, it looks how I want it to (with the help of the theme support) and, most importantly, it lets me publish my blog.

Now, as I was building a couple of themes for my blog I thought that SimpleLog should have a way to generate navigation links to any active pages in the blog.

Following the example of the methods defined in the Site helper class, I decided that a call similar to the following would be appropriate (in a view or layout):

<div id="nav">
  <ul>
    <%= Site.nav_pages_linked @pages %>
  </ul>
</div>

I'm not going to go into any of the basics of plugin creation and mix-ins to extend the functionality of a class using a plugin. The following code in vendor/plugins/simple_nav/lib/simple_nav.rb adds a couple of helper methods to the Site class. These helpers add the necessary helpers to generate the actual navigation links in the views or layouts.

class Site
  class << self
    def nav_page_linked(title, url, is_current = false)
      nav = %Q(<li#{' id="current"' if is_current}>)
      nav += %Q(<a href="#{url}">#{title}</a>)
      nav += %Q()
    end
    def nav_pages_linked(pages)
      nav = ''
      nav += nav_page_linked('Home', Site.full_url, is_home_page)
      pages.each do |p|
        url = Site.link_to_page(p.permalink)
        is_current = page_is('pages/'+p.permalink)
        nav += nav_page_linked(p.title, url, is_current)
      end unless pages.nil?
      nav
    end
  end
end

Of course, this would require that every controller and action with a view or layout using it have loaded the appropriate instance variable with something like this:

  @pages = Page.find(:all, :conditions => 'is_active = true')

To test the helpers, I simply added that line of code to the before_filter of the PostController and PageController classes as well as to the handle_unknown_request method of the ApplicationController.

In my next post, I'll explore how I was able to avoid modifying the controller classes to get the desired result.

Cheers.

--Brent