T-Minus

T-Minus is a Rails engine and set of generators that make it easier to create a prelaunch page for your Rails application. It includes support for the collection of email addresses from interested visitors, and it can automatically update your Campaign Monitor mailing list.

T-Minus currently only works with Rails 3 applications.

You can use T-Minus as a gem by adding it the following line to your Gemfile, then running bundle:install:

gem 't-minus'

Or you can install it as a plugin:

rails plugin install http://github.com/johngrimes/t-minus.git

Getting started

Once you have T-Minus installed, run the installation generator:

rails generate t_minus:install

By default, this will generate the following:

  • Configuration file - config/prelaunch_config.yml
  • Database migration for prelaunch_subscribers
  • Prelaunch page view template - app/views/prelaunch/new.html.erb
  • Prelaunch layout template - app/views/layouts/prelaunch.html.erb
  • Empty prelaunch stylesheet - public/stylesheets/prelaunch.css

Then run:

rake db:migrate

Configuration

The prelaunch_config.yml file is separated into environments, and has the following options:

  • active (optional, defaults to false) - Set this to true in environments in which you want the prelaunch page to show in place of the rest of your app. When your app launches, you can simply change this to false in production.
  • campaign_monitor_api_key and campaign_monitor_list_id (optional) - Add your Campaign Monitor API key and list ID to have new subscribers automatically added.

Having trouble finding your Campaign Monitor API key or list ID? Visit this page.

Customising your model or controller

If you want to customise the PrelaunchController or the PrelaunchSubscriber model, simply use the built-in generators and make changes to the generated files:

rails generate t_minus:controller

rails generate t_minus:model

Contributing to T-Minus

I encourage you to:

  • Fork the project.
  • Make your feature addition or bug fix.
  • Add features / specs for it.
  • Send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.

A quick guide to getting the features and specs running

T-Minus works out on a Rails project in the test/rails_app directory.

First thing to do once you have cloned it down is to go into the test/rails_app directory and run bundle install to get all the dependencies.

Then go back to the root of T-Minus and run:

cucumber

Then:

rake spec

If the features or specs don't pass, please let me know.

Copyright (c) 2010 John Grimes. See LICENSE for details.