Building a Content Managed Site with EngineY

EngineY is not only useful for building social networking sites. EngineY also makes a great platform for building any site in which you want to easily be able to manage its content through a simple UI. For example, the EngineY home page at www.enginey.com doesn’t look at all like a social site, however it is running on EngineY. Each piece of content on that site is editable through the UI. This allows me to quickly and easily make updates and changes to the site. You can also start with a content managed site and slowly add in some of EngineY’s social features.

Creating a sample CMS site
EngineY includes a Rake task that can be used to generate a sample content managed site that you can then modify to meet your unique requirements. To setup this sample CMS site follow these steps:

   rake db:drop:all (remove any existing databases)
   rake db:create:all
   rake db:migrate
   rake enginey:cms_site_init

This will create a site for you with 4 pages, Home, About, Products, and Team. Each of these pages contains managed content sections allowing you to edit any of the site’s content without having to touch source code. To view the edit links for the site content you have to be logged into the site as an admin. The rake task created an admin user for you with the username admin and the password admin. Login by going to: http://localhost:3000/login.

Using the managed content widget
EngineY includes a widget which lets you easily add chunks of managed content to your site. This is the html_content_home widget.

Adding managed content