Fellow Railers,
May I throw out an idea for plugins?
Let’s begin to put sample applications together for our plugins as a
standard practice.
This would be beneficial for a number of reasons:
- Nothing teaches better than a real world example.
- A working application leaves little room for excuses in not being
able to get a plugin working. - Apps can help demonstrate best practices in coding
- (etc., etc.)
It is as simple as creating a folder with the plugin titled
“application” which holds the example application. There will be no
overhead to the user’s app even if the application is never accessed.
And they can delete the application folder should they choose to.
I have beaten my head against several walls trying to work through
documentation written by people who often times forget that their
audience may be approaching Ruby for the first time. It is not enough
to simply demonstrate the basic ruby idioms for new users. Just
because the author can whip out the ruby console and run through the
usage from there does not mean that the average end-user will be able
to make the transition into usage of the plugin in the view and
controller layers of their Rails apps.
Ultimately it is up to the author to make this happen, but I just
wanted to put in my two cents
Blogged here:
http://dathompson.blogspot.com/2006/08/create-example-apps-for-your-plugins.html
Dave
David Andrew T.
http://pecatores.blogspot.com
http://dathompson.blogspot.com