Setting up the default route in Rails 3 and Spree 0.30.1 is fairly simple. A few familiar commands and a few tweaks to the generated files and you will have a landing page created in no time for your Spree commerce website.

Generating a Landing Page Controller

Inside your rails root that is using Spree run the rails generator to create a new controller. Name it as you wish.

rails generate controller Landing index

This should create you several files or you can create them manually. You need the app/controllers/landing_controller.rb and the app/views/landing/index.html.erb.

Once you have these files you want to make a change to the controller file. You want to change the controller to inherit the Spree Application controller.

class LandingController < Spree::BaseController

Next if you want to use the default spree application layout you need to declare that in the controller as well.

class LandingController < Spree::BaseController
 layout 'spree_application'
end

Setting up the Landing Page Route

Another simple step to setup the new default route is to edit the rails_root/config/routes.rb file. This will override your Spree default routes. Just need a single line to set the new rails 3 root to.

root :to => "landing#index"

Conclusion

That is it. Now you can edit your index.html.erb file in your new controller path and you have yourself a custom landing page for Spree. Since the controller inherits from SpreeApplication  you have access to all the features of the Spree store to display products on the home page.

Share your ideas or questions in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Getting Started with Spree 0.30.1 Customizations
2. Building Wordsmith, a Spree Extension
3. Deploying Spree using Heroku

Install Spree 0.30.1

The documentation handles this process of setting up spree and rails fairly well.  Head over to the getting started page on the Spree documentation. Install rails, bundler and spree gems. Then create your rails app, generate your spree files for your app and migrate the database. Optionally you can setup the sample data.

Customizing Spree CSS

With the release of Spree 0.30.1 you now work in the rails root to override the default settings the come in the spree core. If you were familiar with the site_extension this has been revamped and is now a single file in your rails_root/lib directory. Look for the file spree_site.rb.

To override the screen.css file that is built from a laundry list of LESS files in spree-core you can add to the spree_site.rb file.

Spree::Config.set(:stylesheets => 'styles')

This will completely replace the frontend views to use a stylesheet named styles.css in the rails_root/public/stylesheets folder. So simply drop in  your new stylesheet and start coding. Now if you just want to override a few styles consider this entry into your spree_site file.

Spree::Config.set(:stylesheets => 'screen,styles')

Overriding Views in Spree

Next you will probably want to override a few views for your new spree site so simply created the proper folders under the rails_root/app/views. Take a look at the spree core views folder to determine which view files to override.

Adding New Routes

Adding a new homepage to your spree 0.30.1 site is a easy as generating a controller with an index view in your rails_root/app folders and then adding to your rails_root/config/routes.rb the resources route and the root to route which will then override the spree-core root route.

It is really that easy once you understand how the paradigm has shifted for extending your Spree based application. I also have figured out how to get this to run on Heroku already as well and might update my post on using Spree and Heroku that I wrote for a much older release of Spree.

Related posts:

1. Creating A New Home Page Route in Spree 0.30.1
2. Building Wordsmith, a Spree Extension
3. Deploying Spree using Heroku

So I have been thinking a lot lately about e-commerce and related shopping cart products. While working with products like bigcartel.com, Spree, Cubecart and others I have realized there is need to be filled. I see lots of people coming to my website and I have received emails of people looking for help with Spree, bigcartel, analytics and more.

I have several ideas for products that I know would sell upwards of $100 but I have decided I would rather support my readers with a free giveaway.

Here’s what I need from you

If you found this blog because of your interest in e-commerce solutions or trouble working with an existing product and you need further help I would appreciate if you would take just 3 minutes to fill out a quick survey.

Just provide me some of your thoughts and answers to questions as simple as, What *free* product would you like for me to create for you?

If you are able to take the time to fill out this quick survey, and provide me with your email address, I will make sure that when product is ready you will get a copy without having to pull out your credit card.

Thank you so much for reading my blog.

Survey Link

–Matt

Related posts:

1. 4 Top Shopping Cart Solutions Reviewed
2. Almost Free Big Cartel Theme Now Available
3. 7 Reasons to use BigCartel.com