Dynamic Page Titles with Rails and Slim

When optimising your site for SEO it is very important to use a title for each page so that your user's know where they are. It is also valuable for when the user shares your page.

In a Rails project I am working on, Slim is used for the view templates. We had a generic site title for all pages setup in our application.html.slim as follows:

doctype html
html lang="en"
  head
    title My Awesome Site
/...

This is cool if you want the same title for all pages. But customising it per template was a bit more involved.

After a bit of Googling, I came across this question which goes through how to do this for ERB.

As I am new to slim it was not immediately obvious how to port this code to slim. After a bit more Googling I came across this question and this Slim cheatsheet. With all these different sources together I worked out how to implement this in Slim.

First, as per the first linked question we need to update our application_helper.rb as follows:

module ApplicationHelper
 # ...
  def title(page_title)
    content_for(:title) { page_title }
  end
 # ...
end

We then need to go into our application.html.slim and update it as follows:

doctype html
html lang="en"
  head
    title= content_for?(:title) ? content_for(:title) : "My awesome Site"
/...

Finally, for each view we want a custom title for add the following as the first line or in the appropriate if/conditional block/s:

- title "About Us"
/ ...

For views that you do not want a custom title for or you miss, the default you specified in application.html.slim will be used.