Awesome

Parrot Gem: Simple commenting solution for Rails 3 apps.

Installation

1. Add <tt>gem 'parrot'</tt> to your Gemfile
2. Run <tt>rake parrot:install:migrations</tt>
3. Run <tt>rake db:migrate</tt>
4. Run <tt>rails g parrot MODEL_NAME</tt>
5. Add subresources to routes <pre> resources RESOURCE_NAME do resources :parrot_comments, controller: 'parrot/comments', path: 'comments' end </pre>

Notes

Given <tt>@comment = Parrot::Comment.find(id)</tt>:

• <tt>rails g parrot MODEL_NAME</tt> (4th step of the installation) adds a <tt>parrot_comments</tt> class method in the model. It sets a polymorphic relation with <tt>Parrot::Comment</tt>, whose name is <tt>commentable</tt>. You can call <tt>@post.comments</tt> to get related comments, or <tt>@comment.commentable</tt> to get the related entry of a given comment.
• The default "author" model is <tt>User</tt>. You may change it from <tt>config/initializers/parrot.rb</tt>. You can call <tt>@comment.author</tt> to get comment's author.
• User model: has_many :comments, class_name: Parrot::Comment, foreign_key: :author_id
• Parrot views calls <tt>to_s</tt> method on the comment's <tt>author</tt>. You may want to alias it, or the "ugly" Ruby object will be shown: <tt>alias_method :to_s, :name</tt>
• You may define <tt>after_comment_path</tt> method on commentable model for defining where the user should be redirected after commenting (related resource by default).

To-do

• A Parrot::Thread intermediate object between commentable entries and actual comments would abstract the FKs from the comments, would be the only tier between parrot subsystem and host app, and would make (un)subscriptions dead easy.
• Not tested.
• Show partial views examples for showing existing comments and comment form
• Flash responders working?
• Wiki: how to reopen parrot's subclasses from parent applications? (<tt>to_prepare</tt>).

parrot was funded by Chef Surfing.