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Simple, internationalized and DRY page titles and headings for Rails.

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Page title helper

GitHub CI Status Gem Version

This project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

What does this gem do?

Ever wondered if there was an easier and DRY-way to set your page titles (and/or headings), introducing page title helper, a small view helper for Rails to inflect titles from controllers and actions.

In your layout, add this to your <head>-section:

<title><%= page_title %></title>

That's it. Now just add translations, in e.g. config/locales/en.yml:

en:
  contacts:
    index:
      title: "Contacts"

When /contacts/ is requested, the key :en, :contacts, :index, :title is looked up and printed, together with the applications basename, like: Contacts - My cool App. The format etc. is of course configurable, just head down to the options.

Installation

As gem (from rubygems.org):

# then add the following line to Gemfile
gem 'page_title_helper'

# living on the bleeding edge?
gem 'page_title_helper', git: 'git:https://github.com/lwe/page_title_helper.git'

Translated titles

All translated titles are inflected from the current controller and action, so to easily explain all lookups, here an example with the corresponding lookups:

Admin::AccountController#index => :'admin.account.index.title'
                                  :'admin.account.title'
                                  options[:default]

For create and update a further fallback to new.title and edit.title have been added, because they certainly are duplicates.

Customize titles

Need a custom title, or need to fill in some placeholders? Just use the bang method (page_title!), in e.g. contacts/show.html.erb the requirement is to display the contacts name in the <title>-tagas well as in the heading?

<h1><%= page_title!(@contact.name) %></h1>

A call to page_title will now return the contacts name, neat :) if for example the <h1> does not match the <title>, then well, just do something like:

<% page_title!(@contact.name + " (" + @contact.company.name + ")") %>
<h1><%= @contact.name %></h1>

Guess, that's it. Of course it's also possible to use translate within page_title!, to translate custom titles, like:

In config/locales/en.yml:

en:
  dashboard:
    index:
      title: "Welcome back, {{name}}"

In app/views/dashboard/index.html.erb:

<h1><%= page_title!(t('.title', name: @user.first_name)) %></h1>

More fun with :format

The :format option is used to specify how a title is formatted, i.e. if the app name is prepended or appended or if it contains the account name etc. It uses a similar approach as paperclip's path interpolations:

page_title format: ':title / :app' # => "Contacts / My cool app"

Adding custom interpolations is as easy as defining a block, for example to access the current controller:

PageTitleHelper.interpolates :controller do |env|
  env[:view].controller.controller_name.humanize
end

page_title format: ':title / :controller / :app' # => "Welcome back / Dashboard / My cool app"

To access just the title, without any magic app stuff interpolated or appended, use:

page_title! "untitled"
page_title format: false # => "untitled"

Need a custom format for a single title? Just return an array:

In the view:

<h1><%= page_title!(@contact.name, ":title from :company - :app") %></h1> # => <h1>Franz Meyer</h1>

In the <head>:

<title><%= page_title %></title> # => this time it will use custom title like "Franz Meyer from ABC Corp. - My cool app"

To streamline that feature a bit and simplify reuse of often used formats, it's possible to define format aliases like:

In an initializer, e.g., config/initializers/page_title_helper.rb:

PageTitleHelper.formats[:with_company] = ":title from :company - :app"
# show app first for promo pages :)
PageTitleHelper.formats[:promo] = ":app - :title" 

Then in the view to display a contact:

page_title! @contact.name, :with_company

Or for the promo page via config/locales/en.yml (!):

en:
  pages:
    features:
      title:
        - "Features comparison"
        - !ruby/sym promo

Pretty, cool, ain't it? The special format: :app works also via the formats hash. Then there is also a :default format, which can be used to override the default format.

All options - explained

Option Description Default Values
:app Specify the applications name, however it's recommended to define it via translation key :'app.name'. Inflected from Rails.root string
:default String which is displayed when no translation exists and no custom title has been specified. Can also be set to a symbol or array to take advantage of I18n.translate's :default option. 'app.tagline' string, symbol or array of those
:format Defines the output format, accepts a string containing multiple interpolations, or a symbol to a format alias, see More fun with :format. If set to false, just the current title is returned. :default string, symbol

Options can be set globally via PageTitleHelper.options. Note, currently it only makes sense to set :default globally.

To add or change formats use:

# change the default format used (if no format is specified):
PageTitleHelper.formats[:default] = ":title // :app"

# add a custom format alias (which can be used with page_title(format: :promo))
PageTitleHelper.formats[:promo] = ":app // :title"

Note: It's recommended to add this kind of stuff to an initializer, like e.g. config/initializers/page_title_helper.rb.

A (maybe useful) interpolation

The internationalized controller name, with fallback to just display the humanized name:

PageTitleHelper.interpolates :controller do |env|
  c = env[:view].controller
  I18n.t(c.controller_path.tr('/', '.') + '.controller', default: c.controller_name.humanize)
end

Note: Put this kind of stuff into an initializer, like config/initializers/page_title_helper.rb or something like that.

Contributing

Pull request are more than welcome. Please adhere to our code of conduct in discussions and contributions. Thanks!

Maintainers

Licence and copyright

Copyright (c) 2009 Lukas Westermann (Zurich, Switzerland), released under the MIT license