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/music.html http://pond.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Typo-list mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/typo-list
