Professional Ruby on Rails™

Chapter 15. Extending Rails With Plugins

Ruby on Rails has become a complex framework, and it has a lot of useful features. But it doesn't have every feature every user wants. The Rails design team has deliberately chosen not to try and put every imaginable feature in core Rails, a decision backed in Rails 2.0 by the removal of several features out of the core (admittedly, there are still a lot of features there). The Rails mechanism for managing feature overload is the plugin system, which does a fantastic job of delivering Rails extensions of all kinds to the user community. The Rails community as a whole has augmented Rails in every imaginable direction, in a vibrant and active ecology. If you're doing something in your website, and it's a feature that applies to other websites, odds are there's a plugin to help you with it. If there's not, bundle one up and distribute it yourself.

This chapter how to extend Rails with plugins. Although several plugins have already been used in the development of Soups OnLine, there are still some features of plugin management that are worth talking about. You'll also see how to create your own plugins and generators.