Atrium

Atrium is a mountable Rails engine that adds additional functionality to the blacklight Rails engine.

Think of Atrium as a lightweight Content Management System for your Blacklight application. An Atrium::Collection is analogous to one of your managed sites. An Atrium::Exhibit is analogous to one of the top-level pages of your site. These "pages" can be decorated with additional information via the Atrium::Showcase.

The Atrium::BrowseLevel is similar to a group of pages (i.e. directory) at some location in your site's navigation. However, instead of explicitly creating pages in each directory, the Atrium::BrowseLevel interacts with your Blacklight configuration and Solr index to auto-generate these pages.

Getting Started

Make sure your Rails application first has blacklight installed. Then, from the command line:

$ cd /path/to/rails-project
$ rake atrium:install:migrations
$ rails generate atrium:install
$ rake db:migrate

In the all too likely scenario that you want a custom theme for an Atrium::Collection use the following command:

$ rails generate atrium:theme NAME_OF_THEME

Themes

At present, themes are a wrapper around the existing rails templating system. A theme is simply a nested layout that works in conjunction with some yeild blocks in the base atrium layout. This is a pretty flexible solution but requires the implementer to know how layouts and rendering work in Rails. It also means you have to re-deploy the application every time you want to change how it looks.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Hiten Parmar for the gem name. The original atrium gem was an instant web server.