======================================================= | (TUTORIAL) - How to Create and Manage Your Mailers | =======================================================
Key Notes: Our pretend rails app is going to be called (mailbag). If I reference our rails application at any point in this tutorial, I will use mailbag as a descriptive reference. I'm going to assume you know how to create a starting rails application. I'm also going to assume you understand the MVC structure (Model/View/Controller) and how to find environment.rb, routes.rb, and that you also have the ability to navigate through your rails application. For this tutorial, it would be best that you go ahead and create a mailbag rails application and follow along with your test app. I'm not going to go into detail on how to setup sweepers in this tutorial. However, you'll be able to understand why they have their own folder structure once we're finished with the tutorial. ==Prerequisites== If you are using Ruby 1.8.6 or lower you will also have to download a TLS plugin: http://douglasfshearer.com/blog/gmail-smtp-with-ruby-on-rails-and-actionmailer If you are using Ruby >= 1.8.7 or Ruby >= 1.9 you DO NOT need the plugin. -- Create your Rails app for mailbag -- You can use any database (I use mysql) -- Run your rake db:create to create your database -- Keep your rails app open in your IDE/editor environment -- Follow the tutorial below and have some fun :) (Opening) I see a lot of people asking about mailers and I remember when thinking about mailers felt a lot like ruminating on Sunday night in preparation for a Monday morning work day. Well, hopefully when this tutorial is finished, you will no longer feel this way. I'm going to break down the tutorial into multiple pieces for better clarity and readability. ======================================================= What you will accomplish in this tutorial ======================================================= When you are finished, you'll be able to use a Google Mail account (gmail account) to process all mail for your site, have a solid understanding of observers and how to use them, and will be able to send both text or html emails to any of your site visitors. In addition, your mailers will be better organized. TUTORIAL ONE: ======================================================= Organizing your Mailers into an easy-to-read structure ======================================================= Before we start with mailers, wouldn't it be nicer to have them in an organized structure? If we didn't organize them, they would be scattered across many different folder paths. With rails and a few lines of code, you can organize all of your mailers, observers, and sweepers into their own unique folder structure. 1. Open your Config --> Environment.rb file. 2. Place in the following code: (code) http://gist.github.com/278857 3. Create your physical folder structure. Inside of your mailbag --> app directory, create sub-directories for mailers, observers, and sweepers. Directory Structure \mailbag -- \app | -- \mailers -- \observers -- \sweepers 4. Create a mailers view directory to hold all of our mailer views. This views sub-directory will be located in mailbag --> app --> mailers. Directory Structure \mailbag -- \app | -- \mailers | -- \views 5. Create an application_mailer.rb file that will be located in mailbag --> app --> mailers. (code) http://gist.github.com/278865 Final Directory Structure \mailbag -- \app | -- \mailers | -- \views -- application_mailer.rb -- \observers -- \sweepers The final directory structure is also shown in a picture that you can view to compare notes with: http://gi176.photobucket.com/groups/w161/MXFH2FXNBE/mailers_directory.jpg ________ Summary: So, what have we done here? Well, first we let our rails environment know through the environment.rb file that we will be loading paths to our new directories. We also created an ApplicationMailer class that is part of ActionMailer::Base and declared where our template views would be located within that file. By doing so, we now control where all of our mailers will be located. And, this means we can now hold all of our mailers in one central location. By itself, it does nothing at this point. All we've done is organized where our mailers will operate from. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
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