Content marketing with your Rails app
Content marketing encompasses everything that involves creating anything from photos, videos and articles as a “tool” to get your product (name) known, and in the hands of your audience.
Writing quality content in the form of articles and blogposts is still a very effective way for many SaaS apps. When focussed on the right content perfectly in line with your audience, that might find your article and when interesting enough have a look around on your marketing pages or subscribe to your newsletter.
Previously getting started with writing any kind of content was annoying as the extra code you had to write meant just extra hours of work. A third-party solution might be too costly or uses shady tactics (cough Medium.com cough). With your content on your own domain you get the benefit of “getting the SEO juice”,
Get started with content marketing with ease
As marketing is crucial for any (starting) company around, Sjabloon provides a super easy way to get started writing your content. All within the app you already built with the Sjabloon Content Generator.
The Sjabloon Content Generator comes by default with every new app you create. It does not (yet) create the content for you (your creative brain is still needed for that), but it gives you a complete scaffold with beautiful designed pages for all your content to shine. ✨ All you need to do is run one command within your app’s folder: rails generate content ResourceName. Here “ResourceName” can be anything from “Post”, “Article” to ”Blog”.
Tags to categorise all your content
The Sjabloon Content Generator also comes with tags to easily group your content in ways that works for your specific content. This works well for say a blog, but also this very knowledge base uses tags to group similar content (yes, these pages are built with the very generator).
Multiple options for customisation
There are multiple options you can disable when needed: tags, author, admin and markdown. Let’s go over each of these options to see how that works. For this example we use articles.
Run the ‘full suite’
rails generate content Article. This will create a full scaffold including tags, author, markdown and a basic admin (only accessible for logged in users with the admin? flag as true.
No tags
rails generate content Article --skip-tags. If you do not need any tags with your content, you can disable them .
No author
rails generate content Article --skip-author. If you want to skip adding an author to your content, you can skip those.
No markdown
rails generate content Article --skip-markdown. While markdown is great (kramdown is added here), sometimes you do not have a need for it. The default “body” item will be rendered with the Rails-available simple_format instead.
No admin
rails generate content Article --skip-admin. If you have already ad admin set up, you can skip this option. Without it you don’t get a simple admin for creating, updating and deleting your content. Only logged in users with the admin boolean set to true have access.
For more help, run rails generate content --help