Re: Integrating Typo into another RoR app

On 06-Feb, Matthew Van Horn wrote:

> I was wondering if there is a 'best practices' way of
integrating Typo
>  into another rails app.
> 
> Ideally, I'd like single sign-on and the ability to
show the latest 
> blog posts in a sidebar of the other site pages.

Given it's ~6 weeks since your message this is probably
irrelevant now,
but just in case and for the sake of list archives, here's
my spin on it.

The approach I took was to keep a set of stand-alone Rails
applications
broadly independent, but tie them together with a separate
single sign-on
engine. You can include parts of Typo output in other pages
using a
variety of mechanisms such as new actions specifically
designed to return
page fragments for use in sidebars (effectively using Typo
as a Web
service). In my site, I used existing RSS feeds from Typo
and I2 to
produce "latest news" and "recently updated
documentation" lists; for
example, see the Home page:

   http://www.riscosopen.org/


Local modifications for applications can be quite extensive
if you want
to have a unified look and feel since the view templates
need a lot of
attention, so upgrading to newer versions of applications
can be
tiresome. If you weren't too worried about look and feel,
though, the
changes needed for single sign-on integration may be fairly
limited in
scope and while you still have a merge to do when newer
application
versions are released, the merge isn't usually too
difficult.

Downsides: The results are still not as integrated as a
bespoke 
application; the implementation lacks efficiency due to
pulling RSS feeds 
into a wider page in various places; caching is defeated for
the 
applications using the RSS feeds, since they don't know if
the other 
application will be sending new data, so they always have to
rebuild 
their pages just in case.

-- 
TTFN, Andrew Hodgkinson
Find some electronic music at:     Photos, wallpaper,
software and more:
http://pond.org.uk/musi
c.html                        http://pond.org.uk/

_______________________________________________
Typo-list mailing list
Typo-listrubyforge.org
http:
//rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list