cmless

Alternative to full CMS, inspired by Jekyll: Rather than maintaining a database, and worrying about your own WYSIWYG editor, keep site content under version control, use github's editor+preview on the markdown, and this gem provides model classes for access to the data.

The test suite is the best place to look for examples right now. The basic idea is that you subclass Cmless, filling in a few blanks:

• Location of the markdown files is specified via a constant:

ROOT = File.expand_path('../your/relative/path', File.dirname(__FILE__))

• Sections you want to extract are identified with attr_reads:

attr_reader :summary_html
atty_reader :reviews_html

• There are three special html accessors:
  • #head_html will get whatever lies between the h1 at the top, and the first h2.
  • #body_html will grab the rest of the document, h2s and all.
  • #title_html will grab the first h1.

When all this is done you can pull back instances populated with data from the Markdown. Besides the accessors, you can also call

• #ancestors
• #parent
• #children
• #path

These class methods are also available:

• #find_by_path
• #all
• #each and everything else that comes with Enumerable.

If you have a hierarchical structure, note that higher level documents may specify defaults which are inherited by all descendents.

Let's assume you have a rails app, and will use Cmless for the "collection" pages.

In config/routes.rb:

# Only needed if you want a hierarchical collection.
# If it's flat, you could just use the Rails id convention.
allow_slashes = lambda { |req|
  path = req.params['path']
  path.match(/^[a-z0-9\/-]+$/) && !path.match(/^rails/)
}

get '/collections', to: 'collections#index'
get '/collections/*path', to: 'collections#show', constraints: allow_slashes

In app/models/collection.rb:

class Collection < Cmless
  ROOT = File.expand_path('../views/collections', File.dirname(__FILE__))
  attr_reader :body_html
end

In app/controllers/collections_controller.rb:

class CollectionsController
  def index
    @collections = Collection.all
  end
  def show
    @collection = Collection.find_by_path(path)
  end
end

• Make your changes.
• Run tests: rspec
• Clean up formatting: rubocop --auto-correct
• When it works, increment the version number.
• Push changes to Github

To publish gem:

• Create a rubygems account and get your credentials, if you haven't already:

curl -u my-user-name https://rubygems.org/api/v1/api_key.yaml > ~/.gem/credentials
chmod 0600 ~/.gem/credentials

• Create gem: gem build cmless.gemspec
• Push gem: gem push cmless-X.Y.Z.gem