librelist archives

Re: [nesta] Listing categories

From:

Graham Ashton

Date:

2012-02-17 @ 16:28

On 17 Feb 2012, at 15:35, Jake Subs wrote:

> http://www.jrayson.co.uk/blog

I love the design. Very swish.

> I'd like to output a list of article categories on the blog page, any
> idea how I do this?

I suppose the question is, which pages are your category pages? Nesta 
would allow you to have category pages at any location in your site, and 
I'm not sure that you'd necessarily want to include them all in the same 
list.

In other words, these could all be categories:

/blog/design
/blog/design/css
/blog/design/css/tips-n-tricks

If you can describe which pages you'd like to include we can have a crack 
at some Ruby for you.

But here are a few examples anyway...

In a Haml template, you can loop over all the pages on your site like this:

- Page.find_all.each do |page|
  %a{ :href => page.abspath } page.heading

If you wanted to skip some you could put a bit of logic in the loop to 
avoid them. This loop will skip any pages whose absolute paths have more 
than one '/' in them. Almost certainly not what you want, and unlikely to 
return the pages in alphabetical order. But you get the idea.

- Page.find_all.each do |page|
  - next unless page.abspath.count('/') == 1
  %a{ :href => page.abspath } page.heading

The best (i.e. cleanest) approach would be to work out which pages you 
want to display in a helper method. This would go in app.rb:

module Nesta
  class App
    helpers do

      def my_category_pages
        Page.find_all.select do |page|
          page.abspath.count('/') == 1
        end
      end

    end
  end
end

Your template would then be simplified to this:

- my_category_pages.each do |page|
  %a{ :href => page.abspath } page.heading

If there's no simple rule for what to include you might want to control it
manually. There's a special metadata key called "Flags" that'd be perfect 
for this. You could add this to the top of each page that you want to show
up:

    Flag: shown-on-blog

Flags is just a comma separated list; you can put what you like in it.

Then your my_category_pages helper could do this:

  def my_category_pages
    Page.find_all.select { |p| p.flagged_as?('shown-on-blog') }
  end

You could sort the list by page heading too if that made sense.

Let us know what logic would make sense for you though, and we can improve
on that.

--
Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton

On 17 February 2012 16:28, Graham Ashton <graham@effectif.com> wrote:
> I love the design. Very swish.

Thank you. I 'borrowed' the inspiration from no.3 of Four Techniques
for Combining Typefaces. The fonts are from Google Web Fonts. The drop
shadows are courtesy CSS3 ;)
http://www.typography.com/ask/recentTopic.php?rtID=92

I plan to make very simple, 2 column responsive Nesta theme with 3
breakpoints. Once I've worked out how to do it properly.

>> I'd like to output a list of article categories on the blog page,
> I suppose the question is, which pages are your category pages?

Of course, I can just make the pages for the category, and then create
a link to the page. Doh.

My next problem is that I'm getting this error if I have more than one
category on a page:

    NoMethodError at /css
    undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass
    file: models.rb location: block in categories line: 256

Very odd.

> In other words, these could all be categories:
> /blog/design
> /blog/design/css
> /blog/design/css/tips-n-tricks
> If you can describe which pages you'd like to include we can have a 
crack at some Ruby for you.

That's very kind. I won't need them for now, as single tier categories
are more than adequate.

> But here are a few examples anyway...

Thank you for the examples as well. I'll have a good read through and
attempt more sophisticated categorisations at a later date.

many thanks, again, Jake

-- 
[~] Jake Rayson
[w] www.jrayson.co.uk
[e] subs@growdigital.org
[t] @growdigital

On 18 Feb 2012, at 20:48, Jake Subs wrote:

> My next problem is that I'm getting this error if I have more than one
> category on a page:
> 
>    NoMethodError at /css
>    undefined method `downcase' for nil:NilClass
>    file: models.rb location: block in categories line: 256
> 
> Very odd.

Have you got any files in content/pages that don't set a heading? I 
haven't checked the code, but this looks suspiciously like the error that 
gets raised when Nesta can't get a heading for a page.

--
Graham Ashton
Founder, The Agile Planner
http://theagileplanner.com | @agileplanner | @grahamashton

On 18 February 2012 20:58, Graham Ashton <graham@effectif.com> wrote:
>> My next problem is that I'm getting this error if I have more than one
>> category on a page:
>>    NoMethodError at /css

> Have you got any files in content/pages that don't set a heading? I 
haven't checked the code, but this looks suspiciously like the error that 
gets raised when Nesta can't get a heading for a page.

Bingo, that was it. Thank you :)


-- 
[~] Jake Rayson
[w] www.jrayson.co.uk
[e] subs@growdigital.org
[t] @growdigital