Pages and Content Blocks

Fae has a built in system to handle content blocks that are statically wired to pages in your site. This is for content that isn’t tied to an object in your data model, e.g. home, about and terms content.

The system is just your basic inherited singleton with dynamic polymorphic associations. Kidding aside, the complexity of the system is hidden and “it just works™” if you use the generators and/or follow the conventions. This allows for dynamic content blocks that can be added without database migrations and wired up without static IDs!


Pages vs Content Blocks

Pages are groups of content blocks based on the actual pages they appear on the site.

Content blocks are defined in the model and called in the form view. The type refers to the generator API (more information available in the following section)

associated object type form helper
Fae::TextField string fae_content_form
Fae::TextArea text fae_content_form
Fae::Image image fae_image_form
Fae::File file fae_file_form

For the following example, we will use a page called AboutUs, which will have content blocks for hero_image, title, introduction, body and annual_report.

Generating Pages

It is highly recommended you use the built in generator to add pages, especially if it’s the first page in the admin. Let’s do that for our example:

rails g fae:page AboutUs hero_image:image hero_text:string introduction:text body:text annual_report:file

This will generate…

app/models/about_us_page.rb

class AboutUsPage < Fae::StaticPage

  @slug = 'about_us'

  # required to set the has_one associations, Fae::StaticPage will build these associations dynamically
  def self.fae_fields
    {
      hero_image: { type: Fae::Image },
      hero_text: { type: Fae::TextField },
      introduction: { type: Fae::TextArea },
      body: { type: Fae::TextArea },
      annual_report: { type: Fae::File }
    }
  end

end

app/views/fae/pages/about_us.html.slim

= simple_form_for @item, url: fae.update_content_block_path(slug: @item.slug), method: :put do |f|
  header.content-header
    = render 'fae/shared/form_header', header: @item, f: f

  .content
    = fae_input f, :title

    = fae_image_form f, :hero_image
    = fae_content_form f, :hero_text
    = fae_content_form f, :introduction
    = fae_content_form f, :body
    = fae_file_form f, :annual_report

Since this is the first page the generator will create app/controllers/admin/content_blocks_controller.rb, otherwise it would just add to the fae_pages array.

module Admin
  class ContentBlocksController < Fae::StaticPagesController

    private

    def fae_pages
      [AboutUsPage]
    end
  end
end

Adding Content Blocks

Chances are you’ll need to add content blocks to a page after it’s been generated. To do so simply:

Getting Your Content Blocks

Each page generated is a singleton model and each content block is an association to a Fae model.

To get an instance of your page:

@about_us_page = AboutUsPage.instance

Then to get content from a Fae::TextField and Fae::TextArea:

# for `Fae::TextField` or `Fae::TextArea`
@about_us_page.hero_text.content
# ... or ...
@about_us_page.hero_text_content

# for `Fae::Image` or `Fae::File`
@about_us_page.hero_image.asset.url
# for `Fae::Image` only
@about_us_page.hero_image.alt
@about_us_page.hero_image.caption

Invalid Content Block Names

Content blocks are just associations on the page model, which inherits from Fae::Page. Because of this, attributes on Fae::Page are invalid names for content blocks. These attributes are:

Validations on Content Blocks

Since content blocks are setup as associations, adding validations to them can be tricky. To make it easier we setup a method directly in fae_fields hash that will dynamically add the validations to the appropriate model and apply the data-validate attribute in the form so Judge can do it’s best to validate the content on the frontend.

To add validations to a content block, add a validates option with your rules on a specific content block in fae_fields. Format the rules just as you would normal model validations.

app/models/about_us_page.rb

def self.fae_fields
  {
    hero_image: { type: Fae::Image },
    hero_text: {
      type: Fae::TextField,
      validates: { presence: true }
      },
    introduction: {
      type: Fae::TextArea,
      validates: {
          presence: true,
          length: {
            maximum: 100,
            message: 'should be brief (100 characters or less)'
            }
        },
      },
    body: { type: Fae::TextArea },
    annual_report: { type: Fae::File }
  }
end

Validations can only be applied to types Fae::TextField and Fae::TextArea.

Linking to Pages Within Fae

Link to the edit screen of a page and its respective content blocks by adding an item to navigation items.

def nav_items
  [
    ...
    {
      text: 'Pages', sublinks: [
        { text: 'All', path: fae.pages_path },
        # For example, if `@slug = 'home'`
        { text: 'Home', path: fae.edit_content_block_path('home') }
      ]
    }
    ...
  ]
end