Feeder

Feeder gives you a mountable engine that provides a route to a feed page in your Ruby on Rails application.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'feeder'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install feeder

Install the migrations:

rake feeder:install:migrations

Run the migrations:

rake db:migrate

Usage

To make Feeder available, mount it to a route by adding the following somewhere in your config/routes.rb:

mount Feeder::Engine => "/feed"

You will now be able to display a feed on /feed in your application. In order for Feeder to display anything in your feed, however, you will need to make views per item type in the feed. Feeder looks up these views in app/views/feeder/types by default, and then checks for a partial with the same name as your item type. As an example, if you have a Message model that you wish to list out on your feed, you would make a file called _message.html.erb in app/views/feeder/types.

Feeder also comes with an observer for automatically generating wrapper items for your feedables (e.g. messages). In order to use it, you only need to register Feeder::FeedableObserver into your app, which can be done in config/application.rb like this:

config.active_record.observers = [ 'Feeder::FeedableObserver' ]

Then, all you need to do is tell Feeder what to observe, which is done through an initializer, like this:

Feeder.configure do |config|
  config.observe Message
end

... and declare that your Message model is feedable:

class Message < ActiveRecord::Base
  feedable
end

If you don't want to publish every message in the feed, you can supply a condition to observe:

Feeder.configure do |config|
  config.observe Message, if: -> message { message.show_in_feed? }
end

Pretty neat.

Filtering

Want to filter out what feedables to display in your feed? We've got you covered through the all-powerful filter scope! Give it a hash of feedables and the IDs that you want to fetch, and Feeder makes sure to only return feed items with the specified feedables. You may also pass in the symbol :all instead of a list of IDs, which would fetch each of them. For example: say you have the following feedables:

• ShortMessage
• Tweet
• NewsArticle

To get Feeder::Items with news articles having IDs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], tweets [2, 4, 6, 7] and all short message, you could do like this:

Feeder::Item.filter(
  NewsArticle => [1, 2, 3, 4, 5],
  Tweet => [2, 4, 6, 7],
  ShortMessage => :all,
)

NOTE: The filter scope is exclusive, meaning that anything you do not pass in to it will also not be brought back. With the above feedables, if you only want short messages [1, 3, 4], but all of the tweets and news articles, you would have to specify them as well, like this:

Feeder::Item.filter(
  ShortMessage => [1, 3, 4],
  Tweet => :all,
  NewsArticle => :all
)

The following would only return feed items with short messages:

Feeder::Item.filter(ShortMessage => [1, 3, 4])

Configuration

Feeder.configure do |config|
  # A list of scopes that will be applied to the feed items in the controller.
  config.scopes << proc { limit 5 }
end

Stickies

You can "sticky" messages in your feed so they're pinned at the top regardless of when they were created. Just set the sticky attribute and Feeder will take care of the rest.

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request

Credits

Hyper made this. We're a digital communications agency with a passion for good code, and if you're using this library we probably want to hire you.

License

Feeder is available under the MIT license. See the MIT-LICENSE file for more info.