For this site, we will be accepting clients with their own domain name. All of these domain names will be pointed to the same directory on our
server, where the client application lives. I need to be able to use all the same logic – the controllers, right? – but load a different template for each domain, so that each looks like its own site. I have
already determined how to get the domain name being accessed, and can look up which theme the site is using in my database. My confusion comes in what to do next, and how to organize this.
In PHP, I would have a /themes/ directory with a bunch of different
subdirectories, each containing a set of templates. When the client’s site first loads, I would do a query to find out which theme path they are supposed to be using. Let’s say it’s /themes/silver. I would set
that as a session variable and use it whenever loading a template file. How should I approach this in RoR?
My initial thought is using layouts:
You can define the layout for a controller as a function, meaning you could do something like this
def MyController < ApplicationController layout :themed_layout
def themed_layout
session[:layout] ||= Layout.find_by_domain()
end
end
What the above code does is call the themed_layout function whenever someone accesses an action in MyController.
The function will use some code to find out which layout should be used (Here, I’m doing it via a call to a lookup table in an imaginary DB), and cache that into the session[:layout] variable… meaning that the first time it is called, it pulls from the DB, and thereafter, it will simply use what’s stored in session[:layout]. If the session is somehow invalidated, it will re-make the DB call and restore it in the session.
Is this kind of what you’re looking for?
