Thesis

Thesis is an Elixir/Phoenix hex package for quickly and easily adding content editing to any page.

It's inspired by the Rails gem by the same name and author.

2016-03-05-enu58

Installation and Configuration

If you are having problems, view README_INSTALL.md for manual instructions.

1. Add thesis to your mix.exs:

def deps do
  [{:thesis, "~> 0.0.9"}]
end

def application do
  [applications: [:thesis]]
end

2. Run mix thesis.install

This install script will add Thesis to your config.exs and web.ex, as well as generate a migration and an authorization module in lib/thesis_auth.ex.

3. Add the Thesis editor to your layout

  <body>
    <%= thesis_editor(@conn) %>

4. Run mix ecto.migrate

$ mix ecto.migrate

Making Pages Editable

Use the Thesis.View.content/4 view helper function to make a content area editable. If you added use Thesis.View in your web.ex file, this function is already available on all of your views.

Thesis will add a wrapper <div> around editable HTML and plain-text content areas.

Rich Text Areas

Simply wrap your HTML in a content function call.

<h1>Title</h1>
<p>
  Here's my default description!
</p>

becomes...

<%= content(@conn, "Section identifier", :html) do %>
  <h1>Title</h1>
  <p>
    Here's my default description!
  </p>
<% end %>

Plain Text Areas

For plain-text, provide a do: option for default text.

<h1>My Title</h1>

becomes...

<h1><%= content(@conn, "Title identifier", :text, do: "My Title") %></h1>

Authorization

You probably don't want your website editable by the world. Thesis doesn't force you to use any particular authorization strategy. Instead, Thesis will call your auth module's can_edit_page?/1 function and provide the current conn, which can be used to extract current user session data, the current page, and then decide on your own how that should affect authorization.

Here's an example which we use on our own website, https://infinite.red:

defmodule IrWebsite.ThesisAuth do
  def page_is_editable?(conn) do
    !!IrWebsite.AuthController.current_user(conn)
  end
end

In our auth_controller.ex file, the current_user/1 function looks like this:

  def current_user(conn) do
    get_session(conn, :current_user)
  end

So, in this case, we're simply checking to see if the user has been logged in or not. Since we're verifying their identity before letting them log in, it's safe for us to assume that if they're logged in, they have permission to edit the page.

What Thesis Isn't

You can't have it all. Thesis isn't the same as other -bloated- full-functional content management systems out there. This is a list of what it's not now and not likely to be in the future.

We reserve the right to change our mind, however. :-)

Contributing

We're committed to making Thesis the go-to content editing system for Phoenix websites. Please help us improve!

  1. Fork it
  2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
  3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
  4. Write tests for your new feature
  5. Run rake spec in the root directory to ensure that all tests pass.
  6. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
  7. Create new Pull Request

Key Contributors

Also supported by others on the Infinite Red team.

License

Copyright (c) 2016 Infinite Red, Inc.

Thesis depends on Elixir, which is under the Apache 2 license, and Phoenix, which is also MIT.

See LICENSE.md for more information.