Running a blog in a larger site

We start by customising the default templates and applying a different layout to blog articles. We then move the blog to a new URL, freeing up your site's home page for different content.

Copying the default templates

The default theme that comes with Nesta uses HTML5 markup, and WAI-ARIA roles for accessibility. As such, they make a good starting point for anybody wanting to implement a custom design.

To copy all the templates (other than those for the Atom feed and sitemap, which you won't need to modify), run these two commands:

$ cd mysite.com
$ mkdir -p views
$ cp $(bundle show nesta)/views/* ./views
$ rm views/feed.haml views/sitemap.haml

Note: You'll need to substitute Nesta's current version number into the command.

You can now edit the templates in your local views folder, which will be used instead of the templates that ship with Nesta.

Switching from Sass to Scss

Some people prefer the original CSS syntax to Sass's rather neat nested syntax. As a result the Sass developers created the Scss format, which supports pure CSS (with the clever bits from Sass thrown in).

If you'd rather work with Scss than Sass, you can convert the default .sass files, like so:

$ cd views
$ for f in *.sass; do sass-convert $f $(basename $f).scss; done

You'll also need to make sure that requests for CSS files are handled by Sinatra's scss method, rather than the sass method. You can achieve this by adding a route to app.rb.

Open (or create, if it doesn't exist) the app.rb file in your project's top level directory (e.g. mysite.com). Then add the following code (if you find that Nesta::App already exists in app.rb, just add the get block inside it):

module Nesta
  class App
    get '/css/:sheet.css' do
      content_type 'text/css', :charset => 'utf-8'
      scss(params[:sheet].to_sym)
    end
  end
end

Using a different template for blog posts

In the default theme the page.haml template is used to render every page on the site, but you can use a different template for some pages if you prefer. If you only want to allow comments on your blog articles you could remove the comments markup from page.haml and create an article.haml template (that includes the relevant markup) specifically for your blog posts.

Start by creating a template for displaying blog posts:

$ cp views/page.haml views/article.haml

Now edit page.haml, removing the comments template.

You can use article.haml by by adding a line like this to the top of each blog article:

Template: article

See the coverage of "Template" in the metadata reference for more details.

Moving the blog to /blog

If you'd like to list your recent blog articles at the URL /blog, rather than on your site's home page, all you need to do is to create a page in content/pages/blog/index.haml that contains this code:

%section.articles= article_summaries(latest_articles)

It will create a <section/> HTML tag with a class of articles (which is only there as it's useful for applying CSS styles), and will then use the article_summaries helper method to list the latest articles in an <ol/> tag.

If you haven't changed it, you can probably just copy the default index.haml template into content/pages/blog/:

$ mkdir -p content/pages/blog
$ cp content/pages/index.haml content/pages/blog/

Thoughts on blog post URLs

If your site includes breadcrumb navigation to show your visitors where they are, it can be a good idea to make sure that your articles are children of the blog page. If you put them inside the content/pages/blog folder then this will work automatically.

It is by no means the only way to do it though; I often place articles (such as this one) inside the folder containing other pages in the article's main category, rather than dropping content inside the blog folder (it has never felt like a particularly useful part of the URL to me).

Universal IE6 stylesheet

Nesta's default layout includes Andy Clarke's Universal IE6 stylesheets to make sure that the content is available to visitors who are have to use IE6, while freeing developers up to use progressive CSS.

If you'd rather not use it, edit views/layout.haml and remove the line that references universal-ie6-css.