CMS Lite Engine

CMS Lite makes it simple to add lots of content to your rails application without having to add a full CMS system. Frequently, the parties involved in developing your website will have enough technical knowledge to be able to build html pages and add content, but not be experienced enough to build out new controllers and deal with rendering the appropriate templates. CMS Lite addresses this need by centralizing all content into a ‘content’ subdirectory. Tell your content developers to put their code into /content/pages/en or /content/protected-page/en (for content that requires a login) and you’re ready to go.

Installation

Install the gem:

sudo gem install cms-lite

Add the gem to environment.rb

config.gem 'cms-lite', :lib => 'cms_lite'

Handy Rake Tasks

CMS Lite comes with rake tasks that can help you manage your project. These include the ability to send all files from one language to google for translation into 24 other languages. To gain access to these tasks simple add the following lines to Rakefile:

require 'cms_lite'
require 'cms_lite/tasks'

Run rake task:

rake cms_lite:setup

then visit:

http://localhost:3000/cmslite/hello-world

http://localhost:3000/cmslite-protected/hello-world

Usage

To have a page with the url ‘www.example.com/blue/home’ create a page ‘/content/pages/en/blue/home.html.erb To create a page that requires a login at the url ’www.example.com/red/protected’ create a page ‘/content/protected-page/en/red/protected.html.erb’

If you want a page mapped directly off the root ie www.example.com/wow create a directory called default and put the file there. ie ‘content/pages/en/default/wow.html.erb’

You can add new ‘content’ paths by calling append_content_path:

CmsLite.append_content_path("somewhere/else/content")

This let’s you add pages like ‘somewhere/else/content/en/green/home.html.erb’ and find them at www.example.com/green/home

Translate your content with Google

rake cms_lite:translate 

Will translate all files in the 'en' directory into the following languages (codes):
ar bg ca cs da de el en es fr hi id it ja pt-PT sk sr sv vi zh-CN

If you wish to translate from another language -ie your content files are in the es directory then you can do this:
rake cms_lite:translate -language=es

Notes:

CMS Lite Requires a login method called ‘login_required’ that will be called in the event the user is not logged in and attempts to load a protected page.
Don’t mix directories it will mess up the routes. ie if you have a directory named cmslite in pages don’t create a directory called cmslite under protected-pages. If you do Rails won’t know which directory to route too and you will have a bad day.

Layouts:

By default cms lite will look for a layout named ‘application’ and use that to render all pages. You can override that behavior with an initializer. Add a file to config/initializers and name it cms_lite.rb. Add the following line to that file:

CmsLite.cms_layouts = { '/cms' => 'cms_template_', '/help' => 'help', :default => 'default'}

The line above will tell cms lite to render the ‘cms_template’ for any file located under ‘/content/pages/en/cms’ and will also use the ‘help’ layout for any pages located under ‘/content/pages/en/help’. You can specify a default template to be use when no other template is specified by adding :default => ‘template name’. Modify the configuration to meet your needs.

Routes:

CMS Lite will add a route for each subdirectory found under /content/pages/en and /content/protected-pages/en.

Example:

A page found at:
   /content/pages/en/example/my-page.htm 
becomes
   http://localhost:3000/example/my-page

The Basics

The cms lite plugin provides basic template rendering functionality.

Any templates added to /content/pages will be publicly visible.

Any pages added to /content/protected-pages will require a login. CMS lite will use the layout specified in application_controller.rb

Advanced Stuff

The CMS Lite engine can display localized content. To add spanish simply add an ‘es’ directory next to the ‘en’ directory and then copy your content pages to that directory.