Rails 3 - Ideal way to set title of pages

Question

Whats the proper way to set the page title in rails 3. Currently I\'m doing the following:

app/views/layouts/application.html:

Answer 1

There's no need to create any extra function/helper. You should have a look to the documentation.

In the application layout

<% if content_for?(:title) %>
  <%= content_for(:title) %>
<% else %>
  <title>Default title</title>
<% end %>

In the specific layout

<% content_for :title do %>
  <title>Custom title</title>
<% end %>

Answer 2

There are already some good answers, but I'll add my simple approach. Add this to layouts/application.html

- if content_for?(:title)
  -title = "My site | #{content_for(:title)}"
-else
  -title = "My site | #{controller_name.titleize}"

You automagically get a nice names on all your views like "My site | Posts" -- or whatever the controller happens to be.

Of course, you can optionally set a title on a view by adding:

- content_for(:title, 'About')

and get a title like "My site | About".

Answer 3

There's a simple way to manipulate layout variables (title, description, etc.):

# app/views/application.html.erb
<title>
  <%= content_for :title || 'App default title' %>
</title>

# app/views/posts/index.html.erb
<%= content_for :title, 'List of posts' %>

And other pages will have App default title value for their titles

Answer 4

In application layout:

# app/views/layouts/application.html.erb

<title><%= (yield :title) || 'General title' %></title>

then in each view where you want a specific title:

<% content_for :title, 'Specific title' %>

Answer 5

This is my preferred way of doing it:

application_helper.rb

module ApplicationHelper
  def title(*parts)
    content_for(:title) { (parts << t(:site_name)).join(' - ') } unless parts.empty?
  end
end

views/layouts/application.html.erb

<title>
  <%= content_for?(:title) ? yield(:title) : t(:site_name) %>
</title>

config/locales/en.yml

en:
  site_name: "My Website"

This has the nice advantage to always falling back to the site name in your locales, which can be translated on a per-language basis.

Then, on every other page (eg. on the About page) you can simply put:

views/home/about.html.erb

<% title 'About' %>

The resulting title for that page will be:

About - My Website

Simples :)

Answer 6

@akfalcon - I use a similar strategy, but without the helper.. I just set the default @title in the application controller and then use, <%=@title%> in my layout. If I want to override the title, I set it again in the controller action as you do. No magic involved, but it works just fine. I do the same for the meta description & keywords.

I am actually thinking about moving it to the database so an admin could change the titles,etc without having to update the Rails code. You could create a PageTitle model with content, action, and controller. Then create a helper that finds the PageTitle for the controller/action that you are currently rendering (using controller_name and action_name variables). If no match is found, then return the default.

@apeacox - is there a benefit of setting the title in the template? I would think it would be better to place it in the controller as the title relates directly to the action being called.