Tonka Park
Internet marketing and development
Wordsmith 2.0 released
In an earlier post this week, , I wrote about building an extension for Spree, an open source ruby on rails e-commerce platform. I have continued my work this week on the extension to make something useful for my current project and hopefully for the Spree community.
The extension has evolved this week and the direction was better defined. Basically, after having a few more days to review Spree and existing extensions I was able to come up with a solution.
Spree Wordsmith is a blog and minimal cms solution that quickly integrates into Spree. Spree is robust e-commerce solution but sometimes you need just a few extra static pages or want to have a news or blog included in the same source. Wordsmith addresses these needs and stays out of the way of your site.
Wordsmith Features
You can blog, create static pages, manage comments with the popular comment service from Disqus. Each page or post can have a unique permalink, meta keywords and descriptions and posts can have tags. Post and page formating is accomplished using RedCloth and the textile formatting syntax.
Disqus was chosen as the commenting solution to basically outsource the effort in dealing with moderation and spam control of comments. Also with the move towards more social sites this provides an option to take advantage of existing systems.
Check out the github repository for more information on this blogging and cms solution for Spree.
The Pages functionality is a spin-off of an existing extension by Peter Berkenbosch. The implementation is different in database design and administration but the display method is the same. If you don’t need blogging or comments I suggest his extension.
What the future holds
Wordsmith is not perfectly polished and is still an infant. While we are at version 2.0 that is not an indication of the maturity of the project. With the change to Disqus and the addition of pages I simple jumped to version 2.0 to signify the big additions.
The next set of features is likely to contain link or blogroll functionality and perhaps a way to provide custom templates for different pages.
In general I am using Wordpress as a guide to make sure that the most basic blog features are covered for a basic blogger while giving the developers freedom to customize their Spree implementation and include these widely used features without having to integrate multiple applications.
Feel free to fork the project and contribute your ideas on github.
Other helpful projects and links
Ruby Disqus Gem – http://github.com/norman/disqus/
Static-Content extension – http://peterberkenbosch.github.com/spree-static-content/
Disqus Comments – http://disqus.com/
Spree e-commerce – http://spreecommerce.com
