Question

I’m working on a portfolio section for my personal website. Each portfolio item, of which there are many, looks about like this:

  <li>
    <h3>Core Product</h3>
    <ul>
      <li>Snip</li>
      <li>2011 to 2012</li>
    </ul>
    <%= link_to "http://sniphq.com/demo" %>
    <p> 
      Snip is a company I started in January 2011.
      I did all the programming, design, usability testing, sales, marketing&mdash;everything.
      The overall idea is to allow hairstylists to spend more time on hair and less time on everything else.
    </p>
  </li>

I don’t like how the data here is so tightly coupled with how the data is displayed. I would be neat if I could do something like this:

snip:
  client_name: Snip
  project_name: Core Product
  period: 2011 to 2012
  link: http://sniphq.com/demo
  description: Snip is a company I...

And then in my view I could just iterate through these items. I realize I could create a database table for portfolio items, but that would be harder for me as a content writer to maintain, and also more complicated as a programmer than I need it to be.

What would be the best/simplest way to implement this kind of functionality?

Answer 1

There is a gem called StaticModel that you can define your data in a YAML file, and it will have certain attributes of an ActiveRecord::Base class. Check it out here: http://code.quirkey.com/static_model/