Question

My homepage (or welcome page) will consist of data from two models (lets call them authors and posts). I am new to rails and not sure what is the best way to accomplish this.

Should I create a new controller called welcome which gathers data from the authors and posts and then display them in the welcome index view? Or should I have a welcome view under the post model which also gets data from authors? Or any other way to accomplish this?

I understand how to do all this technically but just unsure what is the best practice method using the rails framework.

Answer 1

The question is, is your home page just a landing page or will it be a group of pages? If it’s just a landing page, you don’t expect your users to hang around there for long except to go elsewhere. If it’s a group of pages, or similar to an existing group, you can add an action to the controller it’s most like.

What I’ve done for my current project is make a controller named Static, because I need 3 static pages. The home page is one of these, because there isn’t anything to see or do except go elsewhere.

To map a default route, use the following in routes.rb:

# Place at the end of the routing! map.root :controller => 'MyController', :action => :index 

In my case this would be:

map.root :controller => 'static', :action => :index 

If you wish to, you could create a controller just for this home page. I’d call it main, or something that you can remember which relates to the home page. From there you can get your data and your models and defer to the output view.

class MainController < ApplicationController   def index     @posts = Posts.find(:all, :limit => 10, :order => 'date_posted', :include => :user)   end end 

Assuming you have your model relationships defined correctly, the template to match it will be very simple.

Good luck, hope this helps.