Articles tagged 'slices'

Setup Feather to run as a slice within a Merb app Jan 30 2009

In response to a few queries and comments on my post about the ejdraper.com blog running as a Feather slice underneath a parent Merb application, I decided to put together a sample app demonstrating just how you’d configure such a beast.

Introducing Feather Sample Slice Host… this is an up-to-date Merb application (Merb 1.0.8.1) that hosts Feather as a slice. It comes with a few common plugins installed, and an ultra basic theme override to demonstrate the themes working. It shows how you can easily integrate Feather into a Merb application, and you should be able to use it as a base for any application that you’d like to build with Feather integrated. You need to install Feather as a gem first - for now, simply “git clone” the Feather code, and then run “sudo rake install” in the root of the Feather codebase. A configured development sqlite3 database is included with the sample app so that you should then just be able to “git clone” the host app code and fire it up!

For those that are interested, integrating Feather as a slice boils down to the following steps:

  • if you haven’t already, grab Feather as a gem (same as above, clone the code, and then “sudo rake install” in the project root; this will change when the first gem version of Feather, 0.5, is officially released shortly)
  • create a brand new Merb app
  • add Feather, and a few of it’s dependencies to “config/dependencies.rb”
  • add the appropriate Feather slice commands to the host apps router, to mount Feather at /blog (or wherever you would like)
  • run “rake slices:feather:install” and “rake slices:merb-auth-slice-password:install” from the root of the host app to copy static resources over
  • setup the database, using the “Feather::Database.initial_setup” method from the Merb console (“merb -i”)
  • implement a login form under the “app/views/exceptions/unauthenticated.html.erb” view
  • install any plugins required
  • setup any themes needed (if using the themes plugin)
  • implement the rest of the functionality you want in your host application!

For any of the steps above that aren’t all too clear, you should be able to refer to the sample application now to see exactly what is required. It isn’t currently as straightforward as I’d like, and as a part of the aforementioned 0.5 gem release, I’d like to provide an easy command to add Feather to a Merb application, or create a new Merb host app with Feather already installed as a slice. For now though, the above checklist alongside the sample app should have most of you up and running in no time!

As always, any questions, please feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

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Call To Arms Jun 25 2008

So a quick Feather update: we’re now running against the latest stable versions of Merb (0.9.3) and DataMapper (0.9.1), which should make getting Feather up and running even easier. We’re also currently starting work on running against edge Merb, to try and implement merb-slices, so that Feather can be run as a slice within other apps, and so that Feather plugins themselves are slices in their own right. If you’d like to contribute to that effort, there is a “slices” branch for both core, and plugins. Just fork, hack away, and send me a pull request with your changes!

In other news, the official Merb blog is now running the best Merb blog in the world – that’s right, Feather! It’s great to see the blog running Feather, and we hope we can continue to improve it to make it even more useful for the Merb guys to be able to get out important Merb information and articles!

Also, I’ve been through the tickets on the Feather Lighthouse, and setup two milestones – 0.5, and 1.0. The idea is that 0.5 will aim for stability, and getting the work on slices up and running. Milestone 1.0 will be for trying to improve the distribution, setup and configuration of Feather to make it more user friendly.

There are currently a ton of feature requests and small bug fixes outstanding, that I’ve assigned to me on the LH tracker. I’m going to start to try to get through them, but if anyone out there fancies taking any of them on (a lot of them are great little ways to get into Feather development!), then just let me know, and I can re-assign the ticket to you. There’s no deadline on the 0.5 milestone just yet, but the more contributions we can get to knock off some of the outstanding items, the quicker we’ll hit the milestone! Consider this a call to arms :-)

Lastly, big shout out to some of the contributions coming in – after a mammoth merge session the other night, I rolled in great contributions from aflatter, sudothinker, jf, piclez and fujin. Apologies if I missed anyone else – ping me if I did, and I’ll give you the appropriate kudos.

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