Scott Rutherford

So you’ve seen Ryan Daigle’s article on ResourceFeeder and you want all that RSS goodness. However, you are using Rails 1.1.6 and don’t want to move to edge at the moment.

All you need to do is install the ResourceFeeder and SimplyHelpful plugins:

./script/plugin install resource_feeder
./script/plugin install simply_helpful

This release fixes an issue with the base path to the editor being hardcoded into the helper. The problem arose when hosting an app using named virtual hosts and aliases. e.g. hosting your app at www.mydomain.com/scotts/railsapp instead of www.mydomain.com/railsapp.

This should now all work….....

There is a new version of the FCKeditor plugin up. This fixes a problem I found when running tests. The alias method in the init.rb file was being called for every test and causing an infinite recursion. The README has also been fixed to remove the various typos people have found (thanks for the feedback).

As before you can get the plugin using:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/fckeditorp/trunk/fckeditor

There is also a demo

In this book Robert Scoble and Shea Israel have done a great job of pulling together a whole raft of real world examples of why blogging is important as a business tool. They also present a wide range of opinions on the subject, some a little extreme for my liking, but all in all it provides for a very balanced read.

There has been a lot of action in the online gaming sector recently. Company officers arrested, share prices decimated, its been very exciting, if a little inexplicable. Apparently it could actually bring about the end of civilisation as we know it.

Personally, I feel this whole thing is ridiculous. Lets take Partygaming. Most of games they provide are online tournaments. You pay a fixed entry fee to participate in a competitive event. So it seems that if that is immoral and dangerous then any event that accepts money into a prize pool has to be banned too.

So RailsConf Europe is over, and it was great. There is a slight possibility I may of overdone it, a bit too much burning the candle at both ends but, hey it is the weekend now!!

I had originally intended to post from inside the conference. However, the fact that I couldn’t get the wifi to work in the main auditorium kind of scuppered that. My next plan was to write up anything useful at the end of the day. However, beer scuppered that. So I then gave up on that and decided to post on Friday evening after the event. So, here I am Saturday morning grabbing a full english in the pub over the road from my house – I love it when a plan comes together!!!

So before I head off for the first event on my Rails Conf Europe calendar – Pizza on Rails (sponsored by Cominded). I thought I would mention that Richard White and myself have now released version 3.2.0 of the ajax scaffold plugin. This fixes a few bugs and a compatibility problem with generators before version 3.1.6.

The wiki contains links to various bits of documentation for both the plugin and the generator. Plugin specific posts from myself can be found here

Right, free beer and pizza…...

This release is basically a bug fix. The only really change is to apply the patch kindly provided by Nicola Piccinini which sorts out an issue with file upload from inside the resource manager.

There are a couple of other changes to do with the install and version numbers, but that is all internal to the plugin.

demo

There is a new version of the FCKeditor Rails plugin available details of how to get it and a demo are here.

This version fixes a problem with having multiple editors open at once on the same page and also adds a helper to allow multiple editors on the same Ajax form. This also now works with static html forms but you can just use the standard form helpers for that.

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

The aim of this post is to show how to extend or replace the default functionality of the Ajax Scaffold plugin (ASp). I will go over two areas, firstly how you filter the dataset the table displays, and secondly the methods you can override to really gain control.

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

One of the first things you will probably notice with the Ajax Scaffold plugin (ASp) is that works great if all you want to do is display a table showing all the fields a model has to offer. However, suppose we want to produce a table showing values that come from user defined methods on a model.

For example lets take a User model with the following fields: name, password, created_at, number_of_logins. To create a table that simply shows these fields is easy, simply add the following to the UsersController:

ajax_scaffold: user

but suppose we want one of the columns to contain only the name and the average number of logins per week / per month / per year….

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

Install

The easiest way to install the plugin version of Ajax Scaffold (AS) is to use the inbuilt Rails installer script. Simply run the following command from the root of your Rails app:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ajaxscaffoldp/trunk

This will fetch the plugin into ‘vendor/plugins’. The files required by the plugin (views, css and js) will then be copied over to the app on startup.

Richard White and I now have the first version of the Ajax Scaffold plugin ready. It is available from the RubyForge svn repository. Details of how to get it can be found here

There is also now a wiki covering both the plugin and the generator.