I am completely new on Ruby On Rails and I already watched a long tutorial to start developing a small web application. In such a tutorial I could see several helpers for textboxes, textareas, dates, times, checkboxes, radiobuttons, comboboxes, and so on.
Where can I find other helpers like accordions, WYSIWYG editors (like an HTML editor), and others that can be bound to data from model and used in views? Maybe a toolbox for example.
I will very much appreciate your feedback.
Best regards.
What you're mostly talking about are Form Helpers. There are a bunch of other Rails Guides so I'd recommend reading through them and getting a better idea of what Rails does and can provide.
If you're not finding what you need in that documentation, you may need to add a 3rd party gem to your app's Gemfile, and follow the gem's documentation for getting it working. The Ruby Toolbox is a good place to start searching if you want to see which gems are most common.
And, of course, in the end you might not be able to find something that someone else already wrote and that solves your problem, in which case you will need to write it yourself. For front-end stuff you'll want to get up to speed on how to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Related
I'm a pretty big RoR novice but I've had a lot of problems with finding out even where to begin.
I'm looking for any tutorials or examples of apps that lets a user fill out a simple form in ruby, takes that information, redirects to another page, and posts the information. The user would be able to share that unique link with others, which shows that information.
I've taken a look at various gems such as Formtastic and Simpleforms but the tutorials on Railscast are outdated and it's difficult to get working. I believe it's because I'm on Rails 3.
I'm pretty lost here and if anything can just prod me in the general direction of where to start / give me general strategy of how I should tackle this, it'd be greatly appreciated. This seems incredibly easy but I'm making it harder for myself than what it is.
I'm actually looking to take an intensive RoR course in a few weeks but I need to get this simple MVP app done (it'll include video by nimbb API) for a deadline... so while I should definitely be putting in the effort to learn rather than cheat and drift, your help this time around would really be great :)
To a large extent this functionally is baked into rails. The simplest way to do this is without any extra gems (besides the default ones):
In your terminal run:
rails g scaffold form name:string message:text
Then the user can go to example.com/forms/new and enter their info. Once they submit the form rails auto redirects them to the view page for that new data. The URL of that page which will be something like /forms/n where n is some integer is the link to share.
If your struggling with rails concepts I would look at the rails guides, especially: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html
FAQs seem to be a pretty commonly needed feature in a web application..
but it seems like there are no gems or plugins available for Rails.
Can you recommend a gem or plugin which provides FAQs to a Rails app?
Obviously you could make a simple FAQ very quickly with Rails, but there is much
more functionality that can be added: votes, search, categories, roles,
comments, markup, embedded links, tags, ... just to name a few.
Seems like people are re-inventing the wheel a lot for FAQs
I just published a gem for it.
https://github.com/railscash/how_to
Hope that helps, Its in development phase but we are using it actively. Your comments/feedback will be highly appreciated
I think either using BrowserCMS (http://browsercms.org) or RefineryCMS (http://refinerycms.com/) fits the bill for when you need more generic content pages. I prefer to just use a generic CMS instead of creating a gem/plugin for FAQS as you'll have other pages that could easily be thrown into a CMS engine as well. Saves developer time from having to update mostly static HTML pages.
Absolutely - Check out https://oraguide.com - Everything is streamlined / hosted in the cloud. It runs directly on the page as a floating div.
Most of the time, whenever I hit a website that looks "bubbly" in nature, and all prettified in those pastel-like colors, I think to myself, "This was probably done with Rails." And, lo and behold, after some digging into the site's information pages I discover this is actually true. So, I pose the question, not knowing much about Rails but enough about Django to understand how the database stuff works:
Does RoR have any display-specific qualities that affect how a web page looks? Or do all RoR devs naturally use the same Adobe tools to make everything look so ubiquitous?
Ruby on Rails is a server side technology, so it doesn't lend any specific quality to the user visible design. That said, it is a "trendy" technology so people who are likely to write their back-end code with RoR are likely to choose a particular "Web 2.0" style for their views.
As a Ruby on Rails developer, I can tell you that most Ruby on Rails developers are passionate about their work and we pay a lot of attention to details when building websites as much backend as front end. Its not just a trend, its a way of thinking and working.
No, it hasn't any display-specific qualities.
The theory is that RoR makes that backend stuff easier, so more time can, and apparently is, spent on the front end stuff.
Its all done with Mirrors. And CSS. :)
Rails is a very popular Web framework, it's just be coincidence that all the ones you've looked at have been rails apps.
What kind of sites have you been looking at to draw this hypothesis?
that's a funny question with a funny description :) ... bubbly!
As a madman, I develop with RoR, it's kind of rule in our area. We learn madness from the beginning, as a result of http://railsforzombies.org...
May wise men follow a wise path!
Short Answer: NO
However...
As a Rails developer I can say that due to the Agile nature of Rails and the speed in which you can develop web applications with Rails I do find myself having more time freed up on a project to spend polishing the user interface. I believe this may be a reason you often see more polished looking Rails sites.
So in my mind I believe your choice of framework can have a direct correlation to the end product that is produced!
Rails does add some stuff to the front end. Like to every html form, it will add a hidden input element authenticity_token.
You can also tell because rails URLs and form actions will never end with suffixes like .aspx or .php or .html or .jsp, and they won't usually append ?query=book&encoding=utf8 like you see on google. And they won't usually have superlong crufties like you see on amazon (eg http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby/dp/1934356549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297922135&sr=8-1). Instead Rails prefers simple routing URLs. If amazon were written in rails, you might instead expect amazon.com/books/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby
So there are ways to spot a Rails app. I expect other web frameworks, especially the ones that emulate rails, would duplicate some or all of these features, so this isn't a sure-fire method, but it helps.
Some ruby gems like jekyll, toto and webby offer out of the box blog-type integration into your ruby app. Another way of developing a rich web blog-type application is to build and model the application yourself using pure ruby and rails practices. (e.g creating an Article and User model). The first offers out of the box features the 2nd option offers more customization and control.
In people's experience on Stack Overflow, which would be the best route and what would people consider when making the decision to use a gem out of the box versus going alone?
All of the gems you mentioned take static, markdown/textile/etc files and turn them into HTML websites. They take different approaches to it, with jekyll spitting out the finished website for hosting, toto doing the converting and routing on request, and webby doing the same as jekyll mostly.
If you're using Rails, it's important to note that none of these will integrate into your application well. They're built to more-or-less operate on their own.
Generally speaking, if a gem has the functionality you need, use it. They are not equivalent to plugins you find for Wordpress and Drupal where they are typically low-quality, buggy, poorly documented, etc. More often than not, gems simply add a couple modules that you can integrate into your application how you like.
On the other hand, a basic blog is pretty quick and simple in Rails, especially considering you've got a handy walkthrough guide straight from the Rails documentation on how to do it.
If you're new to Rails and want tight integration with your app, it's probably best to bake your own blog features.
This will take some time to do, but its worth it to learn how things really work.
If you're more seasoned, just look at the gem's API and documentation and decide if it does what you want it to do and if you're comfortable with how to integrate it. If so, it'll save you time.
One other consideration: who will be using the blog? Is it for internal use, and programmers will be the ones updating it? If that's the case, then you can make it very easy by not worrying about a lot of aesthetic polish in the back-end. Conversely, if you're making an app that includes a blogging component for the general public you might want it to feel more polished. In this case a gem might save you a lot of time.
It depends on your application.
I have a Rails 2.3 application which I would like to extract into a plugin, or engine. The application has user authentication, and basic cms capabilities supported by ancestry plugin.
I want to extract the logic for the application into a plugin/engine so that I can use this code for future projects, with a different "skin" or "theme" if required.
I'm not entirely sure I actually understand the difference between plugin and engine concepts, so that would be a good first point.
What is the best approach, are there any good starting points, links, explanations, examples that I should follow. Also, with the release of R3 to consider, is there anything that I should be aware of for that, with regards to plugins etc.
I am going to start off by watching Ryan's http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
but obviously thats over a year old now, so one of the challenges I'm faced with is finding the most up to date and relevant information on this subject.
All tips and help gratefully received.
Actually, converting an application is pretty straigtforward. Just create a plugin-folder, put an app-folder inside containing all yor model-views-controllers folders, and that's it.
You will have to manage your migrations yourself though. Also you have to define rake-tasks to copy files to your public folder. I think the railscasts is still pretty up-to-date, if anything it is now easier in rails 2.3.
Good luck!
[EDIT: for rails3] Rails 3 engines are very clean and powerful. Check this gist by Jose Valim.
You will probably be better off focusing your engine on Rails 3, as opposed to trying to make it compatible for Rails 2 and Rails 3, due to the backwards incompatible changes. Here is a more up to date tutorial for Rails 3
also the book "Crafting Rails applications" by Rails Core member Jose Valim, has a good chapter on it. Int he shows how to use his tool EngineX which generates a Rails 3 engine structure, so you can more easily create engines for your Rails 3 projects. His gem devise is also a rails engine which is also nice, because you can easily customize it by copying the templates into the application directory, and allowing you to subclass the controllers that you want to customize more.
Writing a plugin is an entirely different process than writing an app, if you already have your app code it should be straightforward converting it into a plugin.
Consider that if you use third-party plugins in your app it could get pretty messy.