# Page Engine

Page engine is a (_reasonably_) simple way to extend your rails application with pages. This allows you to automatically generate navigation, breadcrumbs and create page snippets to use anywhere in your app views.

## Installation

For rails 3 and above simply add the following to your gemfile:

	gem 'page_engine'

Then bundle install.

To make use of the assets in the gem add the following to your stylesheets manifest

   *= require page_engine
   
and after jquery in your javascripts manifest 
  
   //= require page_engine

Since rails 3.0 doesn't support the asset pipeline out of the box you will also need to install the gems assets (images, css and javascript) using:

	rails g page_engine

If you've managed to get the asset pipeline working in rails 3.0 then you can skip the above step... and feel free to give yourself a biscuit.

To install the migrations run

  rake page_engine_engine:install:migrations
  


## Usage

In application_controller add the line

	page_engine

and you're good to go. 

You can supply options to page engine, currently just the layouts that should be available to the pages, and you can do this using

	page_engine { :layouts => ['application'] }

## How it works

PageEngine comes with an admin namespace where you can CRUD your pages. It uses [jquery.nestedSortable](http://mjsarfatti.com/sandbox/nestedSortable/ "jquery.nestedSortable") to allow reordering and nesting of pages using drag and drop. When you create the page you can set a url or a controller and action and PageEngine use these to find the correct page. So, for example, say you have a welcome page at welcome#index, if you set the url to '/welcome' or choose welcome#index from the dropdown that page record will be retrieved when the welcome index page is hit and be available to your views.

Using [MarkItUp](http://markitup.jaysalvat.com/home/ "MarkItUp") it's possible to write page content using textile, markdown or plain html. There's also the option to use erb but this is pretty dangerous and open to abuse so don't count on it being in there forever.

## In the views

PageEngine comes with a few helpers:

	navigation(root page permalink, options)

This generates an unordered list (ul) containing the root page and it's descendants up to the depth specified in the options.

	page_content

Renders the page content using the filter specified (textile, markdown etc). Defaults to using the automatically found page and it's body page part but this can be overriden in the options

	breadcrumbs

Generates a set of links that represent the current page and it's ancestors

	page_title
	

	page_js
	

	page_css
	

	page_meta_keywords
	

	page_meta_description
	

	page_snippet snippet name

Renders the named snippet

## Rails engine

Since this was built using the rails 3.1 plugin generator you can test the gem using the dummy application which can be found under spec/dummy.