Just get ActsAsAdminable now!

Admin Interfaces

I was recently working on a site for a client, which was just six simple pages and a CMS in the back-end to administrate content. Our CMS let you add and edit the FAQs on the FAQ page, add/remove downloads on the "Resources" page, etc. I took it to the client and his first question was, "How do I edit the footer?". After discussing, it turned out the client needed the ability to edit any piece of text on the entire site, which was very rich in detail. Every element on the page had a different layout or position, and so on. It's a very graphically complex site!

I could have extended the admin interface to support this. But it wouldn't have fit well with the style of the rest of the admin interface. What would I call that page, "Scattered Bits of Miscellaneous Text"? Something simpler, cleaner and more intuitive was needed.

Enter the Plugin

I searched for a plugin that would solve my problem but didn't find anything that exactly fit my situation, and I didn't look TOO hard because I was already excited at the prospect of writing my own. Long story short, I did, and it's called acts_as_adminable.

Using it couldn't be simpler. After you install it (or run script/runner vendor/plugins/acts_as_adminable/install.rb if you got it via git clone), you just go into your view, find the bit of text you want to replace, and turn it into a content_tag with a :key attribute — and that's it!

An Example

Let's say you have code like this:

<div class="header">
  <h1>At Company Inc., our mission is to meet your needs</h1>
</div>

To administrate this with ActsAsAdminable, first rewrite it like so:

<div class="header">
  <%= content_tag :h1, 'At Company Inc., our mission is to meet your needs', :key => 'mission_statement' %>
</div>

At this point your page should look exactly the same as it did a minute ago; ActsAsAdminable is designed to be easily removed or disabled. Now you just need to tell your controller to make this page adminable:

class PagesController < ApplicationController
  acts_as_adminable :if=>Proc.new{ session[:current_user].is_admin? }
  ...
end

The if parameter is a code snippet that you customize to match whatever you use for authentication. After all, you don't want just anybody to be able to edit your page!

Results

Now when you visit the page, you get a visual clue on mousing over any admin-enabled element. And a single click pops up an Ajax control for editing its contents! Any changes you make will be reflected instantly and for all subsequent visitors. There are only a few caveats:

1. The :key argument must be a globally unique string.
2. The content_tag should also have a unique id HTML attribute, although by default ActsAsAdminable will use the :key for that purpose if you didn't specify your own. So also make sure that you either specify a unique "id" HTML attribute, or that the ":key" does not collide with any other element's "id" attribute.
3. The edit field uses markdown for formatting, so read up if you're not familiar with its syntax.

Now that you know what to do with it, head over to github and simplify your site!