meet blue_velvet

It's certainly been a while, hasn't it? I've been busy with gigs and vacation, so there's been little time to blog. I have been working on stuff...including the foundation of a record label (which I'll talk about in a future post) and maintaining the Wonder Bars' official website.

In the time it's taken me to maintain that site, I've been quietly developing a solution to a problem I think most small-scale developers have, content duplication. In other words, we've all run into the problem of a company's Facebook page saying one thing and their website another. Who wants to log into 2 different accounts just to paste the same paragraph of text? Furthermore, what if each CMS has its own input format...say one lets you do Markdown but the others force you to be either text-only or HTML-only. Now you're looking at converting content, and for non-programmers this may just not be a reality, or if it is it's a nightmare at best.

Something needs to be done. This is the 21st century, after all. With the power of Ruby on Rails and Rails engines, however, there is a solution.

introducing blue_velvet

blue_velvet is a gem I extracted from working code on TheWonderBars.com. The live production codebase uses the gem with all of its default settings. You probably didn't notice, which was the whole point. The gem code is an exact duplicate of the code that previously powered this functionality on the site, so you're getting what I was working with; a powerful, convention-over-configuration engine for displaying Facebook attributes on your own, hosted, well-designed site.

making it work

Sound fun? It's real easy to get started!

Just add

gem 'blue_velvet'

to your Gemfile, run

bundle

and generate the configuration using

rails g facebook:config

Generate a new Facebook app on http://developers.facebook.com. Enter in your App ID and App Secret keys to the proper YAML attributes, then find the Facebook page you want to look for and look for the number after your page's hyphenated name in the URL. That's your page_id, which you need to put into YAML as well.

Now that you're set up to access a Facebook page, you can build routes to your Facebook page's attributes like so:

(in routes.rb)

get "/about" => 'facebook/page#description'

Now type rails server and visit http://localhost:3000/about, and you should see the content of your page's "Description" field. Since this was designed to be used in a [PJAX][pj]-style environment, the attributes are served as partials.

advanced usage

You can also do some cool stuff on the Ruby side to create better views of your Facebook content. For example, The Wonder Bars' /about page uses the following Facebook page information to get all of its content together:

class FacebookController < Facebook::PageController

Accesses 'about', 'description' and 'bio' for a complete "About Us" page.

def about_us @tagline = facebook.about @elevator_pitch = facebook.description @long_form_bio = facebook.bio render layout: false if request.xhr? end end

You can have any controller access that facebook object by simply inheriting from Facebook::PageController. You must cache values from the Facebook page into instance variables for them to become available in the view layer. Any attribute that can be obtained via the Page Graph API can be referenced here in some way. Use the rails console to explore more about the facebook object.

As described above, since the default templates use layout-less partials to serve content, you can create static pages by extending Facebook::PageController and defining custom actions, complete with static views, to serve static Facebook page content on your hosted site.

missing something?

Did you expect blue_velvet to do something that I missed? If so, let me know in the GitHub Issues tracker. Or, you can fork the code and contribute a pull request, I welcome all kinds!