Extras

Here are some ideas for extending its functionality and learning more about Rails development.

Add a Site-Wide Sidebar

Create a shared sidebar partial with links to key pages like:

• Home
• All Articles
• Popular Articles
• Tags

Then render the sidebar in your main layout (application.html.erb).

Add Date-Based Navigation

Let users browse articles by publication month. Steps:

1. Extract the month and year from created_at.
2. Group articles by month.
3. Create navigation links like:

<%= link_to "June 2025", articles_path(month: "2025-06") %>

4. Filter results in the ArticlesController based on params[:month].

Track Article Views

Add a view_count column to your articles table:

rails generate migration AddViewCountToArticles view_count:integer
rake db:migrate

In article.rb, add a method:

def increment_view_count
  self.increment!(:view_count)
end

Call it in the show action of articles_controller.rb.

Show Most Popular Articles

After tracking views, you can display the top 3 articles:

@popular_articles = Article.order(view_count: :desc).limit(3)

Render this list in a sidebar or homepage widget.

Create an RSS Feed

Rails makes it easy to respond with XML. In your controller:

respond_to do |format|
  format.html
  format.rss { render layout: false }
end

Then create index.rss.builder in app/views/articles/ with:

xml.instruct!
xml.rss version: "2.0" do
  xml.channel do
    xml.title "My Blog"
    xml.description "Latest articles"
    xml.link articles_url

    @articles.each do |article|
      xml.item do
        xml.title       article.title
        xml.description truncate(article.body, length: 100)
        xml.pubDate     article.created_at.to_s(:rfc822)
        xml.link        article_url(article)
        xml.guid        article_url(article)
      end
    end
  end
end

Visit /articles.rss to test it!

Keep Exploring

These are just a few enhancements to take your app further. Feel free to experiment and make the app your own!