Joshua Paling

For a spree project I'm working on, I needed a latest products page. Since I'm new to spree/rails, it took me a while, but it's super easy once you know how. Here's how it's done, for any other newbies wanting to display most recent products in spree.

Create a Decorator for the Products Controller

According to the Spree Guides, to customise logic, first up, we need to add a decorator for our products controller.

We can add our decorator anywhere inside the app/controllers directory, or a subfolder of it. The preferred place to add it is inside a spree subfolder. So, create products_controller_decorator.rb inside app/controllers/spree/, and add the following code:

Spree::ProductsController.class_eval do
  def latest
    @products = Spree::Product.available.order('available_on DESC').limit(25);
    render "index"
  end
end

It's a pretty straight-forward method. We simply select 25 Products, and order them by available_on, descending. We use the available scope, to limit our selection to products which actually are available - so products with a future available_on date will be excluded.

We also specify that we want to render the index view for this page - so our latest products page will look the same as our regular products index page. If you don't want to use the index view, delete the render index line, and create a new view template at app/views/spree/products/latest.html.erb.

Add a route for your Latest Products Page

Last but not least, we need to define a route for our latest products page. As it stands, when we try to access www.example.com/products/latest, spree assumes we're trying to show the product with name/slug of 'latest'.

Open up config/routes.rb, and add the following code up the top, just under the line Www::Application.routes.draw do:

Spree::Core::Engine.routes.draw do
  match 'products/latest' => 'products#latest', :as => :latest
end

Now, our latest products page will be available at www.example.com/products/latest, and we can link to it in our view files with something like this:

<a href="<%= spree.latest_path %>">Latest Products</a>

That's it! We're all done, in just a few simple lines of code. But it would have been just as easy with Magento, right? ;)

Add a page for products coming soon

I won't do it here, but it would be similarly easy to add a 'coming soon' page… you'd just have to use the same process as above, but fetch products where the available_on is after today's date.

EDIT:

Actually, it wouldn't be that simple to add a 'coming soon' page. See comment below from Rebecca Skinner: "Not as straightforward to add a 'coming soon' page - products that have an available_on date in the future are not public. And if you make them public, nothing to stop them being added to carts, and purchased."