Summary

Requirements

We’ll be hosting blogs for Agency members on our site. Members have CRUD actions on their blog posts. Admins will be able to “feature” specific blog posts such that they show up in a publicly accessible page.

Proposals

Rich Text

✅ Proposal: Add ActionText

We need a way to support more robust formatting for the text that users write into their blogs. ActionText with the Trix editor is built into Rails. From some light research, it seems like it shouldn’t be too difficult to setup

Pros

1. Built in Rails offering
2. Has a lot of great features and there’s a lot of information out there for extending it.

BlogPost Model

We need a model to persist blog posts.

✅ Proposal: Migration + Model

# migration
def change
  create_table :blog_posts do |t|
    t.string :title, null: false
    t.text :content, null: false
    t.references :user, null: false, foreign_key: true # or `author` ?
    t.integer :status, null: false, default: 0
    t.string :slug
  end
  add_index :blog_posts, :slug, unique: true
end

# app/models/blog.rb
class BlogPost < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user

  enum status: {
    draft: 0,
    published: 1
  }
end

We’ll want a slug for giving human-reader friendly URLs. This will probably be something we can have generated automatically with the friendly_id gem.

Blog Model

A Blog model could function as a collection of BlogPosts.

# blog post migration
def change
  create_table :blogs do |t|
    t.references :user, null: false, foreign_key: true
  end

  add_reference :blog_posts, :blog
end

class Blog < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
end

class BlogPost < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :blog
end

This could allow for users to have multiple blogs.

Pros