Comfy Demo App

This is a simple demo app that has ComfortableMexicanSofa installed, configured and extended. You should be able to recreate everything by creating a fresh Rails app and following these steps.

Step 1: Installation

• Add required gems to Gemfile
• Run rails active_storage:install to pull in ActiveStorage migration
• Run rails action_text:install to install ActiveText stuff
• Run rails webpacker:install to install Webpack stuff
• Run rails g comfy:cms to pull in CMS migration, routes and initializer
• Run migrations: rake db:migrate
• Start the server: rails s
• Navigate to http://localhost:3000/admin
• Log in with default credentials: u: username, p: password

Step 2: Hello World

Create a Site. Comfy is a multi-site capable CMS, but for now we only need to worry about one. Put "Demo" as a Label and Indentifier should auto-populate to "demo". Site will be created and you'll be redirected to the Layout creation view.

Let's create a layout. Set Layout Name to "main". Identifier should auto-populate. Leave Content populated with:

{{cms::wysiwyg content}}

This just indicates that pages using this layout will have a single text field via Wysiwyg HTML editor. Don't worry about Stylesheet and Javascript just yet. After creating your first Layout navigate to Pages section via sidebar navigation.

Now we'll create landing page. Set Label to "Homepage", populate some text like "Hello World" in the Content field and hit Create Page.

Now you have some content that's ready to be served. Navigate to http://localhost:3000/ and you should see your text.

Step 3: Basic Configuration

Open /config/initializers/comfortable_mexican_sofa.rb and change default username and password. This initializer allows to configure things that are relevant to your app. You may utilize authentication provided by Device or whatever you may have in your app. This is the place to set this up.

Step 4: Hello World with Bootstrap 4

While we can put entire html structure of the page inside layout, let's use Rails layouts for it: /app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

Now let's set our layout's app_layout to "application"

Save it and you'll see that "Hello World" is inside Bootstrap container.

Step 5: @cms_site, @cms_layout and @cms_page

When CMS is rendering content you should be able to access above instance variables in the layout, helpers and partials.

Right now let's set page html title like this:

<title><%= @cms_page.present? ? @cms_page.label : "Demo App" %></title>

Step 6: Layout nesting and more Content Tags

Let's update layout content with something like this:

<div class="jumbotron">
  <div class="container">
    <h1>{{ cms:text jumbotron-title }}</h1>
    <p>{{ cms:text jumbotron-text }}</p>
  </div>
</div>
<main class="container">
  {{ cms:wysiwyg content }}
</main>
<hr/>
<footer class="container">
  {{ cms:snippet footer }}
</footer>

All pages using this layout will have appropriate form fields rendered in the admin view.

What if we want to have a similar page markup, but with two columns? You can actually nest layouts. Think of {{ cms:wywiwyg content }} (or any format as long as fragment is named "content") as a conventional yield in Rails layouts.

Next step is to create a new layout that is a child of the existing one. Name it "Two Columns". Populate its content with something like this:

<div class="row">
  <div class="col-md-6">
    <h2>{{ cms:text left-col-title }}</h2>
    <p>{{ cms:markdown left-col-text }}</p>
  </div>
  <div class="col-md-6">
    <h2>{{ cms:text right-col-title }}</h2>
    <p>{{ cms:file demo-image, as: image }}</p>
  </div>
</div>

Pages using this layout will have two column and also jumbotron from the parent layout

Notice the {{ cms:snippet footer }}. Snippet is a reusable content that you populate once and reuse everywhere. Good example would be copyright notice that needs to be at the bottom of all pages. Just create a snippet called "footer" and populate content with "© Copyright 2017"

See WIKI for all available tags and how to use them.

Step 7: Non-renderable Page Fragments and view helpers

There's an option to skip the rendering for some tags. Good example would be meta tags that need to be rendered in the Rails layout. Let's add one of those tags. You may place them anywhere in the layout content.

{{ cms:text meta-description, render: false }}

Now you may access this via cms_fragment_content view helper:

<meta name="description" content="<%= cms_fragment_content("meta-description") %>">

There are several CMS view helpers you may use in your app:

• cms_fragment_content - Raw fragment content
• cms_fragment_render - If fragment content contains more tags, you can expand them
• cms_snippet_content - Raw snippet content
• cms_snippet_render - Use render to expand content with tags

Note: Add helper Comfy::CmsHelper to your ApplicationController if you opted out from auto-loading all view helpers everywhere.

Step 8: CMS Seed Data

Now you know how to structure and populate content. However, during development it's not fun to populate content via admin forms and then doing database dumps and restores. Never mind the complexity of it if you work in a team of people.

CMS Seed Data allows you to create content in files that can get loaded into database automatically.

When you installed CMS you probably noticed that /db/seeds directory was created. It contains an example of how seed data files are structured.

Those files will represent structure and content of your site. To import them into database use rake task

rake 'comfy:cms_seeds:import[sample-site, demo]'

Where first argument is the folder name where the seeds are, and the second argument is the identifier of the site. Be warned that data that is not present in those files will be removed from the database.

Alternativery, you can export everything from the database into a folder by running

rake 'comfy:cms_seeds:export[demo, sample-site]'

Where first argument is the identifier of the site, and the second one is the name of the seeds folder.

During development it would be pretty annoying to run rake task everytime you do a content change. This is why there's config.enable_seeds that is found inside initializer. Set it to true and restart server. Now with each request updated seed data will be automatically pushed into database.

The only catch is that both folder name and site's identifier need to match. Also don't push site to production with that enabled by mistake.

Note: For demo purposes that setting is off. Enable it to play with seed data.

Step 9: Page Translations

After importing CMS Seeds you probably noticed that Homepage has a French translation. The way you populate content there should be pretty obvious already. How is it being served though? Process of serving localized content goes through steps found here: content_controller.rb

For this demo app we have a simple control to switch locales in application_controller.rb

So visiting http://localhost:3000?locale=fr should serve translated content

You can also modify content serving route to look something like this:

comfy_route :cms, path: "/:locale/"

Step 10: Reusing Admin area for other CRUDS

Are you starting a new project? You can reuse Comfy's admin area for your admin views. All you need to do is inherit your controller from Comfy::Admin::Cms::BaseController.

You may use provided scaffold generator to quickly spin up CRUDS. For example:

rails g comfy:scaffold Shoe name:string color:string

You'll get models, migration, controllers, views, and also model and controller tests. Fill in the missing bits and you'll have fully functional admin section.

Step 11: Custom CMS Content Tag

You can add your own CMS content tags. Here's an example of a simple one: lorem_picsum.rb

For more inspiration check out existing CMS content tags

Step 12: Comfy Blog

There's a blog engine that you can just drop in along with CMS: ComfyBlog Install it, restart app and you should be able to access it via http://localhost:3000/blog

Blog posts behave similarly to CMS pages. You may want to override view template that is responsible for rendering /blog view. It was moved into /app/views/comfy/blog/posts Application layout that is used for that view can be changed via comfy_blog initializer. config.app_layout = 'comfy/blog/application'