peanut_gallery

PeanutGallery

PeanutGallery adds a simple commenting feature to your Ruby on Rails application.

Installation

Add Gem To Project

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'peanut_gallery'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install peanut_gallery

Add the Comment Model

Next, you'll want to add a Comment model to your application. You can do this by running the install generator:

$ bundle exec rails g peanut_gallery:install

This will add a migration, so you'll want to migrate your database.

$ bundle exec rake db:migrate

The install generator adds a Comment model to your application. You'll notice the model file has no content, but still works. That's because it is inheriting from the PeanutGallery::Comment model. This is so we can hide the abstracted (repeated) logic. But, you're welcome to override any default logic in your project's Comment model.

Note: PeanutGallery never accesses the base model by default. It will always look for the Comment model in your project.

Usage

There are three items to be concerned with to get PeanutGallery working properly:

1. Routes
2. Associations
3. Forms

Routes

Running the install generator should add the following to your config/routes.rb file:

namespace :peanut_gallery do
  resources :comments, :only => [:create, :update, :destroy]
end

If something went wrong and you don't see this, go ahead and add it manually.

Associations

For any model that you want to have comments, all you have to do is all has_comments to the model. For example, if a Post model has comments, your model might look like this:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_comments
end

This means you can call comments on any single object within this model.

Forms

There is a helper made available to you for rendering a form:

<%= new_comment_form(object, author) %>

Here the object is the item to which you want to attach the comment. The author is the object of the user who is adding the comment.

*Note: PeanutGallery assumes (but does not require) you're using a User model, and that the logged in user is current_user. Therefore, you can leave off the author parameter if you have your current user wrapped up in a current_user method.

Helpers

Deleting Comments

In addition to the forms helper, there is also a helper to delete a comment.

<%= delete_comment_link(comment_object) %>

Of course, you can write this manually (or add your own helper) if you'd like to.

Customization

Overriding A User Model

PeanutGallery assumes the use of a user model. If you want to override that, you'll need to add the association into your Comment model:

class Comment < ActiveRecord::Base
  belongs_to :author, :class_name => 'YourUserClassName'
end

Controller Actions

The controller doing all the work for PeanutGallery is the PeanutGallery::CommentsController. If you want to override it, you can create a controller at app/controllers/peanut_gallery/comments_controller.rb.

Contributing

1. Fork it ( https://github.com/[my-github-username]/peanut_gallery/fork )
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 a new Pull Request