[FLOSS Week]: timeline_fu: activity feeds made awesome

Posted by: James Golick on 2009-02-20

This release announcement is part of FLOSS week.

If you're working on a webapp these days, chances are you've needed to build an activity feed or two. There are a few approaches floating around — mostly involving observers. Not a fan of observers and needing something reusable, we built our own.

To get started with timeline_fu, run the generator.

script/generate timeline_fu && rake db:migrate

You'll get a model called TimelineEvent and the necessary migration. Then, anywhere you need to fire a timeline event, simply declare it.

class Post
  belongs_to :creator, :class_name => "User"

  fires :created, :actor => :creator,
                  :on    => :create
end

This will fire a TimelineEvent called :created in an after_create callback on the Post model. It's properties will be as follows.

@post = Post.create(:creator => current_user, ...)

@timeline_event.event_type #=> :created
@timeline_event.actor      #=> @post.creator
@timeline_event.subject    #=> @post

Then, to display the timeline_events, you'll need an association on your User model. We've frequently defined this as a has_many :through followed items, like how you might imagine it's implemented in the github activity feed. Then, in your dashboards/show.html.erb, you'd have something like this.

<% @user.timeline_events.each do |e|  -%>
  <%= render :partial => 
    "dashboards/timeline_events/#{e.event_type}", :object => e %>
<% end %>

That's it! Just add fires declarations wherever you need to add something to the activity feed and the necessary templates and you're good to go.

Get It!

$ sudo gem install giraffesoft-timeline_fu

Or fork it on github.

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