Keynote: What's New in Bridgetown 1.2, the Plugin Ecosystem, and Content Publishing

In March 2022, after a series of 0.x releases, a public beta cycle, and a successful community fundraiser, Bridgetown 1.0 was released. It offered a robust resource-based content engine, a component-based view layer, an ergonomic DSL for building plugins and extensions, and a nascent framework for building dynamic web applications due to an integration with Roda.

In July 2022, Bridgetown 1.1 was released with additional exciting features such as HTML Inspectors and internationalization support. And now in Q4 2022, we're readying the final release of the year, Bridgetown 1.2 "Bonny Slope".

In this talk, you'll discover how Bonny Slope provides a whole new way of initializing and configuring your Bridgetown sites and plugins. We've opted to pull back just a little bit on the "magic" around the startup process, in order to provide a clear and deterministic way to define settings, load plugins (including third-party gems which know nothing of Bridgetown specifically), and centralize configuration for both Bridgetown builds and the Roda server.

We'll also cover a whirlwind tour of new and upcoming Bridgetown plugins which have been enabled by this new system, including support for Hotwire Turbo Stream responses in dynamic routes, database access powered by Active Record, declarative form objects powered by Phlex, and more.

Finally, we'll discuss some ideas around how to think of your Bridgetown site as a hub for online publishing and efforts to pull your content in from around the web—for example, videos from YouTube, podcasts from Buzzsprout, photos from Glass, microposts from Twitter, and the like. Celebrate the open "indie" web and vibrant home pages and fight the hegemony of proprietary content silos!

Learn Enough Bridgetown to be Dangerous

How do you build a Bridgetown site though? What are the important concepts and terminology? We will do a shallow dive into the basics of the framework in order to give you enough information to be dangerous.

Collections, data files, templates, plugins, and frontend tooling are some of the most important concepts when learning to build your first site. We will also talk about how all of these pieces combine to create your final site. I will also show some some popular plugins and bundled configurations to allow you to move even quicker.

Once we know the basics, we can talk about the most important tool that Bridgetown allows you to take advantage of: Ruby. We will look at examples of custom helpers, the resource builder, components, inspectors, and more that you can implement in your own projects. Building your sites with Bridgetown will help you become a better Ruby developer and allow you to leverage the power of Ruby. Hardly ever written any Ruby outside of a Rails app? This is your chance to rediscover the joys of writing Ruby and give you a great website to show for it.

Content Modeling & API Integrations for the Win

We’ll start by taking a closer look at how Bridgetown manages content and renders static HTML. We’ll then explore how Ruby is used in the view layer via components.

Using the power of Ruby, we can dynamically generate content in a variety of ways. I’ll demonstrate a photo gallery website that builds all its pages and content by reading image files off disk.

And to round off, we’ll break out from the world of static content and built a dynamic endpoint to download a full size image using a signed S3 link.

Setting Up a Bridgetown Blog with Prismic Headless CMS

In this talk we will start with an existing client sample site and dive into how the process of adding content editing functionality will look when the client requests it.

We will use the plugin repo as a reference to implementing and setting up our models, API, as well as setting up Prismic, Render, and linking it all together.

We'll also look at the differences between single custom types and repeatable types in Prismic, as well as how you would set up a YAML file for deploying a preview server to Render.

Database-Driven Apps with Bridgetown, Roda, Hotwire Turbo, and Lifeform

CRUD. No, it's not the debris stuck beneath the sole of your shoe. It's a description of basic interactions on a web app: Create, Read, Update, Delete.

Static web sites only offer the R of CRUD (Read). For some projects, that's fine. It's all you need! But for projects which need true user interactions in the form of entering data in forms, paying for products, or updating content, you'll need to use a framework which provides CRUD. So…Rails, right?

Not so fast! Sure Rails is the heavyweight champion of CRUD apps in the Ruby community, but we have a few tricks up our sleeve. Since Bridgetown 1.0, Bridgetown has shipped with a builtin integration with Roda, a web toolkit for building CRUD-style applications. Conceptually sandwiched in between Sinatra and Rails, Roda over the years has evolved into a compelling platform to build Ruby web applications, and Bridgetown pushes the envelope even further with file-based routes, advanced view templates with components, and an opinionated set of defaults.

Learn how Bridgetown + Roda along with a suite of vital plugins can help you build sophisticated database-driven applications to complement your statically-built pages, and how you can deploy such an application to a modern hosting platform like Render.