Acts As Featurable

  
  In restate.ae, we need to feature some videos and properties in the home page for a specific
  amount of period; so, for that purpose, we create Acts As Featurable. It assumes that you 
  want to "feature" a specific type of object for a pre-defined amount of time.

  To get started, you can easily manage featured objects in a admin UI by scaffolding the 
  featured_period object. Of course, you can add methods to your controllers to manage featured 
  periods in a easier/smarter way.

  == Resources

  Install
   * Run the following command:

   script/plugin install svn://code.spinbits.com/plugins/acts_as_featurable/trunk

   * Create a migration to create the table to hold the featured periods.
   This table holds the information about when and for how long objects are featured in you application.

    def self.up
      create_table "featured_periods", :force => true do |t|
        t.column "featurable_id", :integer
        t.column "featurable_type", :string
        t.column "starts_at", :datetime, :null => false
        t.column "expires_at", :datetime, :null => false
        t.column "created_at", :datetime, :null => false
        t.column "updated_at", :datetime, :null => false
      end
    end

    def self.down
      drop_table :featured_periods
    end

  == Usage

   * Make your ActiveRecord model act as featurable.

    class Video < ActiveRecord::Base
   	  acts_as_featurable
    end

   * Feature a specific model object

    Call the feature! method to feature an object.

    v = Video.find :first
    v.feature!
    v.featured? => true

    Call the unfeature! method to unfeature an object.

    v.unfeature!
    v.featured? => false

    Models are featured for 1 month by default, but you can pass arguments
    to the feature! method to change the default behaviour.

    v.feature! 3.weeks.from_now
    v.featured? => true

    The Video class also gets a new method called find_featured that you can use
    to find the featured objects.

    Video.find_featured :first => # Video id: 18, title: "Skyview Tower" ..

  == Credits

  This plugin is heavily influenced by all Acts As * plugins.

  == More

  http://code.spinbits.com/acts_as_featurable.html
  

TODO

• Add a Rake task to generate the migration automatically.