seamess

Seamess

Seamess is an extremely opinionated CMS framework.

(To be more clear, I am opinionated. It is just an inert pile of code. But the effect is the same.)

Seamess is a Rails 5.1-based engine that can be used with any other Rack app.

It also uses:

• Bootstrap 4 beta
• jQuery 3
• haml
• sass (indented style, not bracket style)

And when I say it's opinionated, I mean that I won't entertain requests to change any of the above.

It's also opinionated because it believes and enforces the following:

1. Page structure should be flat, but slugs should be wholly in the hands of the user. So if you want to nest a page, go ahead and create my-page/ and my-page/sub-page/.
2. Posts and pages should be written in Markdown. Fancy editors break stuff. Learn Markdown, you scrub.
3. Few moving parts. No generators. Those things are murder to maintain.
4. Max depth of two namespaces, and preferrably only one.
5. Maybe more. I'm not 100% solid on the other stuff yet.

Usage

Installation

Install the gem into your Rack application by adding to Gemfile:

gem 'seamess'

Don't forget to bundle.

Mount the engine in your config/routes.rb:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount Seamess::Engine, at: "/my-path"
  root to: "some_controller#some_action"
end

If you're going to serve the application at the root of your site, change that to this:

Rails.application.routes.draw do
  mount Seamess::Engine, at: "/"
  root to: Seamess::Engine
end

Migrations / Seeds

Add to db/seeds.rb:

Seamess::Engine.load_seed

Then run rake seamess:install:migrations db:migrate db:seed.

Assets

Seamess defines base stylesheets but expects that you will override them. So you have to actually create your own, and use sass imports to bring the Seamess sheets into your site. This gives you the bonus of being able to override any variables we define.

Create the app/assets/stylesheets/partials directory and create app/assets/stylesheets/partials/variables.sass within it.

Create app/assets/stylesheets/application.(scss|sass) and add to it:

@import "partials/variables"
@import "seamess/seamess"

Create app/assets/stylesheets/manager.(scss|sass) and add to it:

@import "partials/variables"
@import "seamess/manager"

Layouts

Create app/views/layouts/application.html.haml and add the following content:

= extends :'layouts/seamess/application'

Seamess also ships with a few layouts:

seamess/application : The base template. Gives you the basics. You should probably not use this layout, but extend it on your own.

seamess/columnar : A basic template that can be used for a 12-column reduced-width grid layout. You'd use this on most pages, unless you want a full-width layout. Note that this layout extends from application, not seamess/application.

seamess/fluid : Another basic template that uses Bootstrap's .container-fluid styling for a full-width responsive display. This also extends from application, not seamess/application.

seamess/pages : A template which extends seamess/columnar. I use it to display full-width pages, which look a little bulky when they are the full 12 columns. So this template provides a simple wrapper to further shrink down columnar content.

seamess/manager : A template which is used for the manager. This extends from seamess/fluid. In general, you probably don't want to mess around with this one.

Seamess makes great use out of the nestive gem for parent/child layouts, and for denoting overridable content chunks. If you override a template that has a slash in it, you must prepend layout/, or the layout won't be found.

Nestive does let us do some pretty amazing things. For example, the default brand in Seamess is just controlled by ENV['SITE_TITLE']. But say we want to replace that with something interesting. The layout inheritance lets us do something like the following:

-# app/views/layouts/application.html.haml
= extends :'layouts/seamess/application' do
  = replace :nav_brand do
    = link_to seamess.root_url, class: "navbar-brand" do
      %span.something-funky MyBrand

  -# You need to have 'yield' here or else body content will be missing.
  = yield

Since all of Seamess's layouts inherit from the main app's application layout (excepting application), this will be present on all of the site's pages.

Integrating

Users

You must have at very least a user class in your home application. It's recommended that you also have an Admin class. Be sure to set these in an initializer:

Seamess.admin_class = "Admin"

Seamess also makes the assumption that the following methods will be available to it within both controllers and views:

• authenticate_admin!
• current_admin
• admin_signed_in?

And looks for the following route:

• main_app.destroy_admin_session_path [DELETE]

You should make sure these are defined in your ApplicationHelper and set as view helpers if they aren't already done so for you. (Coincidentally, if you're using Devise in your host app with an Admin class, this is done for you! How easy.)

Devise

Be sure to set config.router_name = :main_app in your config/initializers/devise.rb if you choose Devise for your users.

Contributing

It's still private. Just ping me.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.