Station

Station is a Rails Engine focused on Content Management and Distributed Social Software.

Rails = Ruby + Web Development
Station = Rails + Content Management

Station provides your Rails application with a CMS framework. This means authentication, authorization, roles, permissions, tags, etc… but from a very flexible scope.

Web page

Features

• Agents

  • Authentication: Login/Password, OpenID, Central Authentication Service (CAS), CookieToken

  • Authorization: Access Control, Roles and Permissions (RBAC)

  • Activation: Email validation, Password reset

• Resources

  • Atom feeds, RFC 4287

  • AtomPub protocol, RFC 5023

  • Contents and Containers relations

• Folksonomies: Tags, Taggable models

• Logos for models

• Sortable lists for models

• Integration with exception_notification plugin

Architecture

You can add any of the following functionality to any of your ActiveRecord models:

Basic

ActiveRecord::Agent

a model with authentication, authorization and potencial to perform actions over Resources, e.g. a User

ActiveRecord::Resource

a model that have, at least, CRUD operations and can be imported/exported in different formats, like Atom/RSS.

ActiveRecord::Content

a Resource that belongs to a Container, e.g. a Post

ActiveRecord::Container

a model that have many Contents, e.g. a Project

ActiveRecord::Stage

a model that defines an RBAC Authorization framework for Agents, e.g. a Group

Complements

ActiveRecord::Taggable

a model that can be tagged

ActiveRecord::Logoable

a model with Logo

ActiveRecord::Sortable

a model with a sortable list

Generators

Agents

An Agent has the capability to post Contents to Containers. An User is the example of Agent

script/generate station_agent Model

Resources

script/generate station_scaffold Model attributes

Example

Blog

Create personal blogs with a pair of commands:

script/generate station_agent User
script/generate station_scaffold Article content:text
rake db:migrate

Users now can entry their own Articles

You can add AtomPub support for Articles creation. You must implement params_from_atom method in Article model:

defself.params_from_atom(entry)
{ :body=>entry.content.xml.to_s }
end

Requirements

• Rails 2.3.4

• RubyGems:

  • mislav-will_paginate

  • ruby-openid (optional)

  • atom-tools (optional)

  • nokogiri, prism (optional)

• Rails Plugins:

  • attachment_fu

  • exception_notification (optional)

Installation

Plugins

You need attachment_fu for Logos and Attachments support:

script/plugin install git://github.com/technoweenie/attachment_fu.git

To install Station, run:

script/plugin install -r stable git://github.com/atd/station.git

Install exception_notification plugin if you want to receive debugging emails from your application

script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/exception_notification.git

Gems

Run rake gems:install to install the required gem, mislav-will_paginate

You can install this aditional gems:

• ruby-openid, for OpenID authentication support

• atom-tools, for AtomPub support

• nokogiri, prism, for HTML management, Microformats discovery

TODO

• Agents authentication support: OAuth

• Microformats

• RDF: FOAF + SIOC

Copyright © 2008-2010 Antonio Tapiador, released under the LGPL license