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High Voltage Build Status Reviewed by Hound

Rails engine for static pages.

... but be careful. Danger!

Static pages?

Yeah, like "About us", "Directions", marketing pages, etc.

Installation

There are two ways to install High Voltage.

You can run:

$ gem install high_voltage

Or you can include in your Gemfile:

gem 'high_voltage', '~> 3.1'

Usage

Write your static pages and put them in the RAILS_ROOT/app/views/pages directory.

$ mkdir app/views/pages
$ touch app/views/pages/about.html.erb

After putting something interesting there, you can link to it from anywhere in your app with:

<%= link_to 'About', page_path('about') %>

You can nest pages in a directory structure, if that makes sense from a URL perspective for you:

<%= link_to 'Q4 Reports', page_path('about/corporate/policies/HR/en_US/biz/sales/Quarter-Four') %>

Bam.

You can also get a list of your static pages by calling HighVoltage.page_ids This might be useful if you need to build a sitemap. For example, if you are using the sitemap_generator gem, you could add something like this to your sitemap config file:

HighVoltage.page_ids.each do |page|
  add page, changefreq: 'monthly'
end

Configuration

Routing overview

By default, the static page routes will be like /pages/:id (where :id is the view filename).

If you want to route to a static page in another location (for example, a homepage), do this:

get 'pages/home' => 'high_voltage/pages#show', id: 'home'

In that case, you'd need an app/views/pages/home.html.erb file.

Generally speaking, you need to route to the 'show' action with an :id param of the view filename.

High Voltage will generate a named route method of page_path. If you want to generate your own named route (with the :as routing option), make sure not to use :page as it will conflict with the High Voltage named route.

Specifying a root path

You can configure the root route to a High Voltage page like this:

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.home_page = 'home'
end

Which will render the page from app/views/pages/home.html.erb when the '/' route of the site is accessed.

Note: High Voltage also creates a search engine friendly 301 redirect. Any attempt to access the path '/home' will be redirected to '/'.

Top-level routes

You can remove the directory pages from the URL path and serve up routes from the root of the domain path:

http://www.example.com/about
http://www.example.com/company

Would look for corresponding files:

app/views/pages/about.html.erb
app/views/pages/company.html.erb

This is accomplished by setting the route_drawer to HighVoltage::RouteDrawers::Root

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.route_drawer = HighVoltage::RouteDrawers::Root
end

Disabling routes

The default routes can be completely removed by setting the routes to false:

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.routes = false
end

Specifying Rails engine for routes

If you are using multiple Rails engines within your application, you can specify which engine to define the default HighVoltage routes on.

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.parent_engine = MyEngine
end

Page titles and meta-data

We suggest using content_for and yield for setting custom page titles and meta-data on High Voltage pages.

# app/views/pages/about.html.erb
<% content_for :page_title, 'About Us - Custom page title' %>

Then print the contents of :title into the layout:

# app/views/layouts/application.html.erb
<title><%= yield(:page_title) %></title>

Content path

High Voltage uses a default path and folder of 'pages', i.e. 'url.com/pages/contact', 'app/views/pages'.

You can change this in an initializer:

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.content_path = 'site/'
end

Caching

Built in caching support has been removed in HighVoltage. See PR 221.

Page caching and action caching can be done via Rails. Visit the Caching with Rails: An overview guide for more details. You can utilize the methods described there by overriding the HighVoltage controller as described below.

Override

Most common reasons to override?

  • You need authentication around the pages to make sure a user is signed in.
  • You need to render different layouts for different pages.
  • You need to render a partial from the app/views/pages directory.
  • You need to use your own Page resource and would like to use StaticPage resource for high voltage

Create a PagesController of your own:

$ rails generate controller pages

Disable the default routes:

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.routes = false
end

Define a route for the new PagesController:

# config/routes.rb
get "/pages/*id" => 'pages#show', as: :page, format: false

# if routing the root path, update for your controller
root to: 'pages#show', id: 'home'

Then modify new PagesController to include the High Voltage static page concern:

# app/controllers/pages_controller.rb
class PagesController < ApplicationController
  include HighVoltage::StaticPage

  before_action :authenticate
  layout :layout_for_page

  private

  def layout_for_page
    case params[:id]
    when 'home'
      'home'
    else
      'application'
    end
  end
end

To set up a different layout for all High Voltage static pages, use an initializer:

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.layout = 'your_layout'
end

To use StaticPage resource, turn off routing and use this route:

get "/static_pages/*id" => 'high_voltage/pages#show', as: :static_page, format: false

Custom finding

You can further control the algorithm used to find pages by overriding the page_finder_factory method:

# app/controllers/pages_controller.rb
class PagesController < ApplicationController
  include HighVoltage::StaticPage

  private

  def page_finder_factory
    Rot13PageFinder
  end
end

The easiest thing is to subclass HighVoltage::PageFinder, which provides you with page_id:

class Rot13PageFinder < HighVoltage::PageFinder
  def find
    paths = super.split('/')
    directory = paths[0..-2]
    filename = paths[-1].tr('a-z','n-za-m')

    File.join(*directory, filename)
  end
end

Use this to create a custom file mapping, clean filenames for your file system, A/B test, and so on.

Localization

Rails I18n guides.

Add a before filter to the Application controller

# app/controllers/application_controller.rb
before_action :set_locale

def set_locale
  I18n.locale = params[:locale] || I18n.default_locale
end

Disable the default High Voltage routes

# config/initializers/high_voltage.rb
HighVoltage.configure do |config|
  config.routes = false
end
# config/routes.rb
scope "/:locale", locale: /en|bn|hi/ do
  get "/pages/:id" => "high_voltage/pages#show", :as => :page, :format => false
end

Add a static page to the project

# app/views/pages/about.html.erb
<%= t "hello" %>

Make sure that there are corresponding locale files

/config/locale/bn.yml
/config/locale/en.yml
/config/locale/hi.yml

One last note is there is a known issue with High Voltage.

You'll need to specify routes like this <%= link_to "About Us", page_path(id: "about") %>

Testing

You can test your static pages using RSpec and shoulda-matchers:

# spec/controllers/pages_controller_spec.rb
describe PagesController, '#show' do
  %w(earn_money screencast about contact).each do |page|
    context "on GET to /pages/#{page}" do
      before do
        get :show, id: page
      end

      it { should respond_with(:success) }
      it { should render_template(page) }
    end
  end
end

If you're not using a custom PagesController be sure to test HighVoltage::PagesController instead.

Enjoy!

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md. Thank you, contributors!

License

High Voltage is copyright © 2009-2024 thoughtbot. It is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the LICENSE file.