Meow!

This is a very boring blogging platform based on Rails geared toward Rails developers. It has very little in the way of frills and is designed to get up and running fast with an easy to understand codebase.

Its built as a Rails Engine and therefore should be easy to customize and extend as you see fit.

This might not be good for you if:

  • You have many contributors and need role based permissions
  • If you need to track changes in articles
  • Make extensive use of images

Features

  • Tagging
  • Basic user authentication
  • Trix editing
  • Basic slug management

That's about it for now, though I'm sure features will evolve slowy as needs are recognized through use.

Requirements

This application is currently tested on Rails 7, Ruby 3.1 and the PostgreSQL database.

Setup

Configuration is the same as a typical installation of a Rails Engine

  • Create new Rails app
  • Include hyper-kitten-meow gem by adding gem 'hyper-kitten-meow' to your Gemfile
  • Mount the engine by adding mount HyperKitten::Meow::Engine, at: "/blog" to the routes file. You can also mount the engine to your project's root by adding mount HyperKitten::Meow::Engine, at: "/" instead.
  • Install the migrations by running rake hyper_kitten_meow:install:migrations
  • Run the migrations rake db:migrate
  • Add an admin user by using the Rails console rails hyper_kitten:meow:create_user
  • Set the values in the en.yml file to your liking

Customization

There currently is no theme in place, so the views will have to be styled themselves.

  • Frontend views are where you would expect them to be. So:

    • app/views/layouts/hyper_kitten/meow/application.html.haml
    • app/views/hyper_kitten/meow

  • Admin styles and markup are in the Admin namespace. So:

    • app/assets/stylesheets/hyper_kitten/meow/admin
    • app/views/layouts/hyper_kitten/meow/admin.html.haml
    • app/views/admin/hyper_kitten/meow

If you duplicate these files and directories in your project you can override the views and customize them however you like.

Static Pages

If you would like to add static pages to your site I recommend High Voltage.

Deployment instructions

You can deploy the app however you like, but I like Heroku. Especially their hobby plan. To deploy on Heroku:

  • heroku create [your app name]
  • git push heroku master
  • heroku run rake db:setup
  • Create your admin user in the console.
    • heroku run rails console
    • rails hyper_kitten:meow:create_user
  • heroku open

Todo:

  • Figure out a clean and easy way to allow image uploads that doesn't complicate setup
  • Add RSS support
  • Add correct head parameters for SEO

Running the Test Suite

bin/rspec spec

License

This project rocks and uses MIT-LICENSE.