Alchemy CMS: Create element that contains list of elements - ruby-on-rails

I'd like to create an element which can contain a list of items, where each item can have more than one essences.
For example:
The user should be able to add a "page listing" as content element. For each page item he should be able to upload a small image, a short description and a link. Because the list needs to be wrapped with an UL tag, I can't simply ask him to add a lot of elements.
Other example:
The user should be able to add a "team listing" as content element. Each member having a photo, a name, a job description and an email address. Same problem here: I'd like to have the team members wrapped within an DL tag.
Is there some way of releasing elements which can contain elements?
Some kind like: (just an example, might contain bugs)
- name: my_list_element
contents:
- name: list_style
type: EssenceSelect
- name: items
type: Element ???
elements: [my_item_element]
settings:
deletable: true
available_contents:
- name: items
type: Element ???
elements: [my_item_element]
settings:
deletable: true
- name: my_item_element
contents:
- name: image
type: EssencePicture
- name: headline
type: EssenceText
...
The inner item uses the default editor for pictures or text essences.
If someone knows a way how to realize this it would be very great, because it's the last puzzle part which is missing in order to use alchemy CMS :(
Thank you in advance

You want to use the new nestable Elements feature you'll find in the current master and soon to be released 3.3 version. Unfortunately they are not well documented yet. Sorry.
But it's really simple. Instead of the available_contents (That will be deprecated in favor of nested elements anyway, you list names of nestable_elements).
A nestable element can be any element you have defined.
Unless the guides got updated, please read the documentation in the code.

You may use http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.1.0/libdoc/yaml/rdoc/YAML.html and get Hash in the output and also save it in text as well

Hope to see nestable_elements feature soon, may be it will solve some really obvious tasks. For now, without the possibility to easy extend Alchemy with custom models (Post, TeamMember, Testimonial, PortfolioItem, etc) I am still the fan on RefineryCMS or pure RoR, and this is sad, because AlchemyCMS has really nice things built-in.
As I can understand, this feature will be implemented in Alchemy 4 by Nodes, even the Page model will be registered as Alchemy::Node, and developer will be able to create own Nodes which will behave like custom_post_type in WordPress.

Related

End user can edit the view of a recored in some sort of editor - rails

I'm looking for something like an editor but instead of the user editing just a post or page the user can edit the default template layout or view layout for all pages associated to something.
I'll give an example to get my question across because i really don't know what it would be called.
Say for example you have categories. (people, animals, etc..)
Now imagine there is a category of people, each person in the category has the keys 'height', 'weight' and 'age' and each key has values assigned to them (height: 120 cm, weight: 80 pounds, age: 25)
I want the user to be able to edit the layout of the people page (page template or view that each person is displayed on) and be able to add in the keys they want to be displayed on the page.
So say they add the keys ‘height’ and ‘weight’ it will only display the height and weight on every person page, plus whatever pre set text the user added in the template editor for the people pages to display.
I could probably find a good editor that can be customised and change it to my liking but there might already be gems out there made for this.
My question is, is there a gem for basically letting users set templates for record pages.
Even if there is something out there to change views for objects but the user cant set the keys on it, i'd still like to see it because I might be able to add the key/value functionality to it.
Hopefully you understand what I'm looking for.
UPDATE
Ok so i appears I'm after an editor that works with a template engine like liquid or one thats both an editor and template engine.
If you plan on building from scratch, it sounds like it could be done using rails generate scaffold this allows views/models/controllers to create pages for each of your categories.
Then you can use Associations to create associations between your categories.
You can also make different user roles by making a field called "Role" in your Users relation
Otherwise, there are also open-source software Active Admin to manage content for your categories.
EDIT: After looking around I found a gem you can use to have end-users edit your own views, feel free to check out Liquid.

In Appium 1.0+, now that finding elements by tag is deprecated, how do I find an element by tag name when operating on the DOM of the webview?

Once I switch my context to the DOM of the webview, I want to be able to search those elements by tag, but I get the error that searching by tag is deprecated and to search by class instead. This won't work to find DOM elements by tag. Is there still a way to do it? Thanks!
As per Appium documentation for migrating to 1.0:
We've removed the following locator strategies:
-name
-tag name
... tag name has been replaced by class name. So to find an element by its
UI type, use the class name locator strategy for your client.
Why searching by tag name?
Although Selenium still supports this type of query, Appium decided not to do anymore. Actually when interacting with the device, searching by tag name is very inefficient.
Why would you want to do that? Think about it, if your page has a bit of content, you will end up having many p, div, span tags. Your search will return many elements and then you will have to go thorugh the list and locate the one you are interested in. If your page is very little, then you will probably end up with one tag of the type you are looking for, however why not applying a class and solve the problem?
Classes are not for CSS style
Remember that HTML attribute class was not introduced by W3C for applying CSS style. It is used to provide an element with more informationa bout its purpose in the DOM. When you apply a class to an element, you should do that basing on the role that element holds! Thus locating an element by class is sure better.
So forget searching by tag name. You should change your strategy and apply class names to your tags in your hybrid app. If you do not want to do so, then do not switch to the new version of Appium but this will keep you far from future innovations!
Migrating from a tagname based element location to a class name
orientd one is good practice. That's why you should change too.
maybe this can help
element.getAttribute("class")

How to create a tagging system like on Stack Overflow or Quora

I want to create a tagging system like seen here on Stack Overflow or on Quora. It'll be its own model, and I'm planning on using this autocomplete plugin to help users find tags. I have a couple of questions:
I want tags to be entirely user-generated. If a user inputs a new tag by typing it and pressing an "Add" button, then that tag is added to the db, but if a user types in an existing tag, then it uses that one. I'm thinking of using code like this:
def create
#video.tags = find_or_create_by_name(#video.tags.name)
end
Am I on the right track?
I'd like to implement something like on Stack Overflow or Quora such that when you click a tag from the suggested list or click an "Add" button, that tag gets added right above the text field with ajax. How would I go about implementing something like that?
I know this is kind of an open-ended question. I'm not really looking for the exact code as much as a general nudge in the right direction. Of course, code examples wouldn't hurt :)
Note I am NOT asking for help on how to set up the jQuery autocomplete plugin... I know how to do that. Rather, it seems like I'll have to modify the code in the plugin so that instead of the tags being added inside the text field, they are added above the text field. I'd appreciate any direction with this.
mbleigh's acts_as_taggable_on gem is a feature-complete solution that you should definitely look into a little more closely. The implementation is rock-solid and flexible to use. However, it is mostly concerned with attaching tags to objects, retrieving tags on objects, and searching for tagged items. This is all backend server stuff.
Most of the functionality you are looking to change (based on your comments) is actually related more to your front-end UI implementation, and the gem doesn't really do much for you there. I'll take your requests one-by-one.
If user inputs a new tag, that tag
gets added, if user inputs an
existing tag, the existing tag gets
used. acts_as_taggable_on does this.
Click a tag from suggested list to
add that tag. This is an
implementation issue - on the
back-end you'll need to collect the
suggested list of tags, then display
those in your presentation as links
to your processing function.
Autocomplete as user enters
potential tag. You'll use the jQuery
autocomplete plugin against a list
of items pulled off the tags table.
With additional jQuery, you can
capture when they've selected one of
the options, or completed entering
their new tag, and then call the
processing function.
Restrict users to entering only one
tag. This will be your UI
implementation - once they've
entered or selected a tag, you
process it. If they enter two words
separated by a comma, then before or
during processing you have to either
treat it as one tag, or take only
the text up to the first comma and
discard the rest.
When you process the addition of a
tag, you will have to do two things.
First, you'll need to handle the UI
display changes to reflect that a
tag has been entered/chosen. This
includes placing the tag in the
"seleted" area, removing it from the
"available" display, updating any
counters, etc. Second, you'll need
to send a request to the server to
actually add the tag to the object
and persist that fact to the
database (where the taggable gem will take over for you). You can either do this via
an individual AJAX request per tag,
or you can handle it when you submit
the form. If the latter, you'll need
a var to keep the running list of
tags that have been added/removed
and you'll need code to handle
adding/removing values to that var.
For an example of saving tags while editing but not sending to server/db until saving a form, you might take a look at the tagging functionality on Tumblr's new post page. You can add/remove tags at will while creating the post, but none of it goes to the database until you click save.
As you can see, most of this is on you to determine and code, but has very little to do with the backend part. The gem will take care of that for you quite nicely.
I hope this helps get you moving in the right direction.
The more I try to force the acts-as-taggable-on gem to work the more I think these are fundamentally different types of problems. Specifically because of aliases. The gem considers each tag to be its own special snowflake, making it difficult to create synonyms. In some cases it doesn't go far enough, if you want the Tag to have a description you'd need to edit the given migrations (which isn't hard to do).
Here's what I'm considering implementing, given the trouble I've had implementing via the gem. Let's assume you want to create a tagging system for Technologies.
Consider the following psuedo code, I haven't yet tested it.
rails g model Tech usage_count::integer description:text icon_url:string etc. Run the migration. Note the
Now in the controller you will need to increment usage_count each time something happens, the user submits a new question tagged with given text.
rails g model Name::Tech belongs_to:Tech name:string
Name::Tech model
belongs_to :tech
end
Then you could search via something like:
search = Name::Tech.where("name LIKE :prefix", prefix: "word_start%")
.joins(:tech)
.order(usage_count: desc)
.limit(5)
This is starting point. It's fundamentally different from the gem, as each tag is just a string on its own, but references a richer data table on the back end. I'll work on implementing and come back to update with a better solution.

How to structure content in Ruby (RoR) app?

I am in the process of building a super simple CMS to handle smaller "static" page type projects (e.g. - small sites for friends). I have different "page types" that I would like to add. I built something similar in Coldfusion previously. Looked something like this:
table content_type:
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_type_name
table content:
content_id
content_type_code varchar(10)
content_name
content_desc
content_url
I would create a content type called "blog" or "photo" and each time a content was added, it'd get assigned the content_type_code. Then in /blog/ I'd query for all content that had a content_type_code of "blog".
Now that I'm using Ruby/RoR I am trying to think about things differently. I was thinking a better way might be to use nested pages with awesome_nested_set (https://github.com/collectiveidea/awesome_nested_set). But I'm not sure if that's the best solution.
Then I could create a page called "blog" and add to that many pages. So essentially the top level would take place of the "content_type" from my previous example.
Can someone steer me in the right direction on what the best method would be? I'm a newb looking for a kick in the right direction.
EDIT
I should add that the only real thing that I would change between the different "types" of content would be the layout and where they are displayed ("photo" content at /photos/, "blog" content at /blog/).
I try to recap:
You want to build a CMS
Your CMS manages a single web site
A web site is made of content
There are differenti type of contents, and I am assuming every type of content has its own behaviour
Contents are organized in a tree
Here is the plan I suggest you:
Create the Content resource; use the scaffold to have something already working, adding few field (title and body in example)
Add validations to your new model
Write a couple of unit tests against your validation (quite useless, just to see how it works)
Install awesome_nested_set and manage to make it working with your model
Work on the UI to make it quite easy to create new content, move content around, edit a single content
Now its time to implement the content types; STI is the Rails way, but I have to warn you it can be really hard. I suggest you to reiterate 1, 2, 3, 5 to create new models for Photo and BlogPost
Once you will be there, you will have hundreds of ideas to implement. Have fun :)
Instead of using content_type I would rather let the user choose a model on a selection page, like "photo" or "blog" and load an editing page based on that selection. So the user wants a new 'blog'-entry they get redirected to blog/new or 'photo' for photo/new. It's the easiest way to go in terms of usability and your controlling backend and you don't have redundant data (for example an empty photo url which is not necessary in a blog-type) in your database.

Rails Dynamic tag generation from context

Let's say I want to trend all comments posted on a site and create dynamic tags. For example, If there are x number of comments that contain the word iPad I would like to create automatically create a tag called "iPad" and put it in a tag cloud.
Is this possible? I checked out the acts_as_taggable gem but it requires one to specify a tag, I guess I am looking for a way to generate tags from content.
Well something like the yahoo term extraction service might do the trick and there is a plugin for it http://expressica.com/auto_tags/.
Though it is not for commercial use.
Sure, this is possible.
Just parse the content of each comment as it's passed in and attach the tags you're interested in.
This can either work on a whitelist - where you specify all the tags you're interested in and attach those if relevant.
Or it could work on a blacklist - where you specify all the words to ignore, e.g. "the", "on". This approach is probably a lot more time consuming, but would allow for more dynamic results.
I would probably work on a white list, then have an ability to add new tags to the whitelist and have it go back and retroactively add the tags where applicable.

Resources