Slightly Dynamic Pages

Now that we’ve created the actions and views for somestatic pages, we’ll makethem very slightly dynamic by adding some content that changes on a per-page basis: We’ll have the title of each page change to reflect its content. Whether a changing title represents truly dynamic content is debatable, but in any case it lays the necessary foundation for unambiguously dynamic content in Chapter 7

If you skipped the TDD material in Section 3.2, be sure to create an About page at this point using the code from Listing 3.14, Listing 3.15, and Listing 3.16.

Testing a Title Change

Our plan is to edit the Home, Help, and About pages to make page titles that change on each page. This will involve using the <title> tag in our page views. Most browsers display the contents of the title tag at the top of the browser window (Google Chrome is an odd exception), and it is also important for search-engine optimization. We’ll start by writing tests for the titles, then add the titles themselves, and then use a layout file to refactor the resulting pages and eliminate duplication.

You may have noticed that the rails new command already created a layout file. We’ll learn its purpose shortly, but for now you should rename it before proceeding

(mv is a Unix command; on Windows you may need to rename the file using the file browser or the rename command.) You wouldn’t normally do this in a real application, but it’s easier to understand the purpose of the layout file if we start by disabling it.  

      By the end of this section, all three of our static pages will have titles of the form ‘‘Ruby on Rails Tutorial Sample App | Home,’’ where the last part of the title will vary depending on the page (Table 3.1). We’ll build on the tests in Listing 3.13, adding title tests following the model in Listing 3.17.