I can’t believe how difficult it’s been to find a good solution for plugging a simple blog into an existing Rails app. I wanted to add a blog to SwingTradeBot, the new site I’m building but most answers to this question that I’ve found say to either use RefineryCMS or “roll your own. Well I tried Refinery and quickly ran into gem conflicts galore. As for rolling my own… I don’t have time for that — I’d rather use something that’s been thought through and is well suited to the task.
I was ready to give up and just roll my own when I found the Monologue gem. That looked really promising but then I ran into a Rails 4 compatibility issue. However, reading through the discussion thread on that issue I discovered that somebody had created the Blogo gem (plugin / engine).
It’s still early days with this gem but so far, so good for the most part. Installation and set-up went smoothly (in development mode). Here are some things I ran into after pushing to production (on Heroku):
- There’s a generator to create the admin user (rake blogo:create_user[user_name,user@email.com,password]) – that didn’t work in production. I didn’t find out until after creating the user manually in a Rails console that I needed to prepend ‘RAILS_ENV=production” to the rake command.
- The assets were missing. running “RAILS_ENV=production rake assets:precompile” fixed that.
- Note that for comment to appear you need to be signed up for Disqus and you need to enter your site’s short name into the Blogo config.
- There are some configuration options that I had to discover via digging through the code. See below for an example of what I’ve added to my config/application.rb
Here’s what’s in my config/application.rb:
Blogo.config.site_title = "SwingTradeBot Blog"
Blogo.config.site_subtitle = "Some clever subtitle..."
Blogo.config.keywords = 'stock trading, technical analysis, stock scanning'
Blogo.config.disqus_shortname = 'swingtradebot'
Blogo.config.twitter_username = 'swingtradebot'