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Last week the Uberkit kicked off with some helpers to make your menu-building much easier. This week we’re following it up with UberForms, a Form Builder that DRYs up your repetitive form stresses. Let’s see how it works!

Building an Uber-er Form

UberForms automatically generate all of the standard boilerplate HTML that goes around your forms. By wrapping everything up in an easily style-able package, it becomes a much easier business to make new forms as well as re-use form styling across projects. With the form markup taken care of, you can focus on the more important aspects of your UI building and keep your views deadly clean.

While UberForms are available as a standard form builder (Uberkit::Forms::Builder), you may find it more useful in its helper form (automatically available when the UberKit plugin is loaded:

<% uberform_for :user do |f| %>
  <%= f.text_field :login %>
  <%= f.password_field :password %>
  <%= f.submit "Submit"%>
<% end %>

This will automatically be translated into some nice, CSS-ready HTML:

<form method="post" class="uberform" action="/users">
  <div class="field_row">
    <label for="user_login">Login:</label>
    <input type="text" size="30" name="user[login]" id="user_login" class="text_field"/>
    <br/>
  </div>
  <div class="field_row">
    <label for="user_password">Password:</label>
    <input type="password" size="30" name="user[password]" id="user_password" class="password_field"/>
    <br/>
  </div>
  <button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>

You can also change the label, add a description or help text to a field by adding the relevant options:

<%= f.text_field :login, :label => "Username", 
                         :help => "Only a-z and underscores.", 
                         :description => "The name you will use to log in." %>

Becomes…

<div class="field_row">
  <label for="user_login">Username:</label>
  <input type="text" size="30" name="user[login]" label="Username" id="user_login" help="Only a-z and underscores." description="The name you will use to log in." class="text_field"/>
  <span class="help">Only a-z and underscores.</span>
  <span class="description">The name you will use to log in.</span>
  <br/>
</div>

Finally, you can create custom HTML inside an UberForm field by passing a block:

<% f.custom :label => "State", :for => "user_state" do |f| %>
  <%= state_select :user, :state %>
<% end %>

Becomes…

<div class="field_row">
  <label for="user_state">State:</label>
  <div class="pseudo_field">
    <select id="user_state">...</select>
  </div> 
  <br/>
</div>

Easy, right? That’s all there is to it, now you can be UberForming to your heart’s content

Installation

To install the UberKit (which includes more than just forms) you can do so either as a gem or a traditional plugin. As a gem, just add this to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'mbleigh-uberkit', :lib => 'uberkit', :source => 'http://gems.github.com'

As a traditional Rails plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/uberkit.git

The Future of the UberKit

These two pieces are pretty helpful, but there’s more coming for the UberKit. Stay tuned for more updates, including more hooks and ways to customize the UberKit to fit your needs as a developer.

So many of components we build into our web applications have a grain of an extractable element, a standardization waiting to happen. Starting today, I am putting together a “Standard UI Kit” for all of the tools that help me build interfaces faster. Together, they are called the UberKit. This week, the first segment is coming: UberMenus.

UberMenu: Abstract Menu Generation

Most people who build interfaces will build their menus with the same structure over and over. I finally took the time to abstract this out into a single helper that can pretty much serve all of my navigational needs. Here’s how you use it in a view:

<% ubermenu do |m| %>
  <% m.action 'Home', '/' %>
  <% m.action 'Users', users_path %>
  <% m.action 'Log Out', logout_path, :class => "special" %>
<% end %>

Becomes this HTML (assuming you’re at the document root):

<ul>
  <li class="first current first_current"><a href="/">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="/users">Users</a></li>
  <li class="special last"><a href="/logout">Log Out</a></li>
</ul>

The current class will automatically be set on whichever page responds to the built-in Rails helper current_page? and the action syntax behaves just like a link_to. If a given action has multiple classes, they will also be joined with underscores as an additional class for browsers that do not support multiple class declarations. But in addition to easily creating simple menus, you can also easily generate multi-level navigation menus:

<% ubermenu 'nav' do |m| %>
  <% m.action 'Home', home_path %>
  <% m.submenu 'Services', services_path do |s| %>
    <% s.action 'Service A', service_path('a') %>
    <% s.action 'Service B', service_path('b') %>
  <% end %>
<% end %>

Which will become this HTML:

<ul id='nav'>
  <li class='first current first_current'><a href="/">Home</a></li>
  <li class='last'><a href="/services">Services</a>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="/services/a">Service A</a></li>
      <li><a href="/services/b">Service B</a></li>
    </ul>
  </li>
</ul>

Installation

UberKit is available both as a gem and a traditional plugin. For the gem version, add this to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'mbleigh-uberkit', :source => "http://gems.github.com/", :lib => "uberkit"

Or as a traditional plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/uberkit.git

Future of the UberKit

While UberMenu is a useful tool, the UberKit will continue to grow over time, so stay tuned for additions (next on the slate: UberForm). It may also grow to include some common styles and javascripts that can be used in conjunction with the helpers to provide an even easier track to a full-fledged UI.

Resources

As always, the source is on GitHub and there is an Acts As Community Profile available as well. If you have any problems with it or would like to request new features, enter them on the Lighthouse project.

Almost every Rails developer has written an app with more than one user role, but when is_admin? isn’t enough, where do you go? RankFu aims to solve this by giving you a rich toolset for roles. Now it’s free to allow users to have more than one role, so you can have modifiers such as ‘Trusted’ and ‘New’ trivially. It’s also easy to have sets of roles, with administrators outranking moderators. Sets are optional though, so you’re free not to put Telephone Sanitizers in one due to their obvious lack of importance.

Throughout this piece, I’ll be talking about the ubiquitous User model, but you can use RankFu with any model you wish to.

Rankin’ Fu

When you install RankFu, you can add several new methods to your models:

User#has_role? 
User#has_role
User#"#{role}?" 
User#"#{role}_exactly?"    #This forces an exact comparison, useful if you want to test for a role which has a superset (e.g. moderators and  administrators)
User#"make_#{role}          
User#"remove_#{role}" 
User#rank                #Returns a string listing all roles, modifiers first eg: "Trusted Administrator" 
User#roles                #Returns an array of role names.

There is also some sugar for disabling users, to make your code more readable. These examples assume the existence of role with :disabled as its key:

User#disable_user 
User#enable_user
User#enabled?                       

Building on this, you can easily clean up your views. I DRY’d up many instances login check logic.

def logged_in_as_mod?
def logged_in_as?(user)  
def logged_in_as_friend_of?(user)  
def logged_in_as_or_as_friend_of?(user)   

There might have been a few others, but I don’t want to give any more ammunition to those who accuse me of pedantry.

InstallationFu

The easiest way to install is as a standard Rails plugin:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mjt/rank_fu.git

After installing this plugin, you’ll want to start by performing some admin:

script/generate rank_fu user
script/generate rank_fu roles         #create migration for roles 

After that, you’ll probably want to add roles to your user model, so just add this line:

knows_rank_fu

Then you need to create some roles. I suggest using the excellent Seed Fu plugin so you can do something like this:

Role.destroy_all
roles = [ {:id => 1, :key => "root",      :name=> "Superuser", :value => 2**22, :set => 1},
          {:id => 2, :key => "admin",     :name=> "Administrator", :value => 2**21, :set => 1},
          {:id => 3, :key => "moderator", :name=> "Editor", :value => 2**20, :set => 1},     
          {:id => 5, :key => "member",    :name=> "Member", :value => 2**10, :is_default => true}]

roles.each do |role|                          
  Role.create role
end

What’s going on here?

Not much.

Internally, bitwise arithmetic is used to store each model’s role-state. Once a model knows RankFu, you can assign and remove roles freely, knowing that RankFu is a good citizen and uses update_attribute internally.

You may also find that you can reduce your use of STI by separating users by roles.

Please feel free to leave any feedback in the comments.

RSpec is a great tool that has come to replace Test::Unit for many Rails developers. Autotest makes it go even faster, and has become an indispensable part of my development environment. However, it has always been somewhat-to-extremely difficult to use RSpec when developing Rails plugins. In this post I will walk through step-by-step how to get RSpec and Autotest working with your plugin.

This plugin is assuming that you are running Rails >= 2.1 and have already installed RSpec and RSpec::Rails as plugins in your Rails project like so:

script/plugin install git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git
script/plugin install git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec-rails.git

And also gotten RSpec up and running by calling script/generate rspec.

Generate It

Luckily, I wasn’t the first person who ever wanted to create a plugin that was tested with RSpec. The Rspec Plugin Generator will do most of the heavy lifting for us when we start out. Just install it like so:

script/plugin install git://github.com/pat-maddox/rspec-plugin-generator.git

And you’re ready to get started. I’m assuming here that this is a brand new plugin, if it’s already in development you may need to run this in a fresh directory and then copy/paste files as needed to glue it together. Let’s say I’m writing a plugin called new_fu. I can generate an RSpec-ready plugin simply by calling:

script/generate rspec_plugin new_fu

This will generate the standard plugin structure as well as some extra files:

create  vendor/plugins/new_fu/spec
create  vendor/plugins/new_fu/spec/spec_helper.rb
create  vendor/plugins/new_fu/spec/new_fu_spec.rb

You can take a look at these to see how they work, but pretty simply they hook your plugin up so that it can be run with rake spec:plugins. Let’s add a simple example to our new_fu_spec.rb file:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/spec_helper'

describe "NewFu" do
  it "should have a pending spec" 
end

Now if you run rake spec:plugins you should see one pending spec. Congratulations, your plugin is now running on RSpec!

Autotest Like a Champ

Ok, so now we’re up and running with RSpec on our plugin. That’s great, but if you have several plugins in the same Rails app that all have specs, it starts to get messy when you run that rake spec:plugins. Not to mention how long it takes between runs! We need to get an autotest setup like we have for our main Rails app!

I struggled with getting this to work for a long time, so thanks to this post on Rails Symphonies for finally pointing me in the right direction. First we need to create an autotest/discover.rb file in our plugin’s lib directory. In that file, put this code:

$:.push(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), %w[.. .. rspec]))  

Autotest.add_discovery do  
  "rspec" 
end

This gets us almost exactly where we want to be. However, the first time I ran it I had two problems: some specs that I had written were strangely failing, and it wasn’t in color or following the rest of my spec.opts preferences from my main app!

To remedy this, we need a spec.opts in the spec directory of the plugin. You can either copy and paste it in from your Rails app (my recommendation if you are publishing your plugin) or you can just create a softlink back to it:

ln -s ../../../../spec/spec.opts spec.opts

That’s it! Now if you run autotest you should be running all of the specs for your plugin just as you would if you were running them for your app. Note that this doesn’t hook in to your app’s autotest, which may be desirable or undesirable to your specific needs.

An extremely common practice for Rails applications is to provide keyed access through subdomains (i.e. http://someaccount.awesomeapp.com/). However, there has never been a real unified convention for handling this functionality. DHH’s Account Location works for some circumstances but is more tailored for a Basecamp domain model (i.e. the app is on a separate domain from all other functionality, so you can always expect a subdomain) than the more common usage of one domain only.

SubdomainFu aims to provide a simple, generic toolset for dealing with subdomains in Rails applications. Rather than tie the functionality to something specific like an account, SubdomainFu simply provides a foundation upon which any subdomain-keyed system can easily be built.

Usage Fu

SubdomainFu works by riding on top of the URL Rewriting engine provided with Rails. This way you can use it anywhere you normally generate URLs: through url_for, in named routes, and in resources-based routes. There’s a small amount of configuration that is needed to get you running (though the defaults should work for most).

To set it up, you can modify any of these settings (the defaults are shown):

# in environment.rb

# These are the sizes of the domain (i.e. 0 for localhost, 1 for something.com)
# for each of your environments
SubdomainFu.tld_sizes = { :development => 0,
                          :test => 0,
                          :production => 1 }

# These are the subdomains that will be equivalent to no subdomain
SubdomainFu.mirrors = ["www"]

# This is the "preferred mirror" if you would rather show this subdomain
# in the URL than no subdomain at all.
SubdomainFu.preferred_mirror = "www"

Now when you’re in your application, you will have access to two useful features: a current_subdomain method and the URL Rewriting helpers. The current_subdomain method will give you the current subdomain or return nil if there is no subdomain or the current subdomain is a mirror:

# http://some_subdomain.myapp.com/
current_subdomain # => "some_subdomain" 

# http://www.myapp.com/ or http://myapp.com/
current_subdomain # => nil

# http://some.subdomain.myapp.com
current_subdomain # => "some.subdomain"

The URL rewriting features of SubdomainFu come through a :subdomain option passed to any URL generating method. Here are some examples (in these examples, the current page is considered to be ‘http://intridea.com/’):

url_for(:controller => "my_controller", 
  :action => "my_action", 
  :subdomain => "awesome") # => http://awesome.intridea.com/my_controller/my_action

users_url(:subdomain => false)  # => http://intridea.com/users

# The full URL will be generated if the subdomain is not the same as the
# current subdomain, regardless of whether _path or _url is used.
users_path(:subdomain => "fun") # => http://fun.intridea.com/users
users_path(:subdomain => false) # => /users

While this is just a simple set of tools, it can allow the easy creation of powerful subdomain-using tools. Note that the easiest way to locally test multiple subdomains on your app is to edit /etc/hosts and add subdomains like so:

127.0.0.1    localhost subdomain1.localhost subdomain2.localhost www.localhost

Adding an entry for each subdomain you want to use locally. Then you need to flush your local DNS cache to make sure your changes are picked up:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

Installation

SubdomainFu is available both as a traditional plugin and as a GemPlugin for Rails 2.1 and later. For a traditional plugin, install like so:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/subdomain-fu.git

For a GemPlugin, add this dependency to your environment.rb:

config.gem 'mbleigh-subdomain-fu', :source => "http://gems.github.com/", :lib => "subdomain-fu"

Implementing A Simple Account Key System

Let’s take this functionality and implement a simple account-key system based off of the subdomain. We’ll start with some controller code (assuming that we have an Account model with a ‘subdomain’ field):

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  protected

  # Will either fetch the current account or return nil if none is found
  def current_account
    @account ||= Account.find_by_subdomain(current_subdomain)
  end
  # Make this method visible to views as well
  helper_method :current_account

  # This is a before_filter we'll use in other controllers
  def account_required
    unless current_account
      flash[:error] = "Could not find the account '#{current_subdomain}'" 
      redirect_to :controller => "site", :action => "home", :subdomain => false
    end
  end
end

That’s really all we need for a basic setup, now let’s say we have a ProjectsController that you must specify an account to access:

class ProjectsController < ApplicationController
  # Redirect users away if no subdomain is specified
  before_filter :account_required
end

There’s lots more you can do with the plugin, but this is a simple use case that everyone can relate to.

Resources and Plans

A feature that I hoped would make it to the first release of SubdomainFu but is now a planned feature is subdomain-aware routing so that you can add conditional subdomain routes to your routes.rb file. Keep an eye out for more on that in the future.

In the meantime, the project will live at its home on Acts As Community for intermittent updates, is available on GitHub as always, and bugs/feature requests may be passed on through the Lighthouse.

Badger is a simple Rails plugin that creates photo badges. A site often allows its users to upload a profile image. A profile image is just that, an image resized to fit in a predefined space to show up in the user’s profile.

With Badger, you can have something prettier – a badge that shows the user- uploaded image on top of another image that identifies the user as a part of the community. We have company badges, security badges, so why not web badges to have your users show off his/her affection for your site?

Badger works by accepting cropping parameters of the overlay image in a hash (x1, y1, width, height), which is used to crop the overlay image. It then resizes the cropped image to the size specified by composite_width and composite_height in badger.yml. Finally, it places the resized image on top of the background image at location specified by composite_x and composite_y in badger.yml. The resulting image is saved back to either the filesystem or Amazon S3, using attachment_fu.

Badger requires the attachment_fu plugin, ImageMagick, and MiniMagick. Also, the JavaScript Image Cropper UI can be used to obtain the cropping parameters from the users.

Configuration

When this plugin is installed , the badger.yml will be copied to the config directory. You need to specify the following:

1. background : filename of the background image, searching from public/images
2. composite_x : top left corner of the overlay image location in x
3. composite_y : top left corner of the overlay image location in y
4. composite_width : width of the overlay image in pixels
5. composite_height : height of the overlay image in pixels

For example, I want to overlay an image on top of a background image (badge.jpg). The box for the overlay image should be 30 pixels in width and 20 pixels in height, and it should appear at (x, y) = (60, 80) of the background image. My badger.yml then looks like:

  development:
    background: badge.jpg
    composite_x: 60
    composite_y: 80
    composite_width: 30
    composite_height: 20

Example

In the model that you use to store attachments:

  class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
    has_attachment :content_type => :image,
                   :storage => :s3,
                   :max_size => 1.megabytes,
                   :resize_to => '320x200>',
                   :thumbnails => { :thumb => '100x100>' },
                   :processor => :MiniMagick
    validates_as_attachment
    has_badge :storage => :s3
  end

In the controller:

  def create_my_awesome_badge
    @photo = Photo.find(params[:id])
    # params[:crop_coord] is a hash with indexes x1, y1, width, height
    @photo.create_badge(params[:crop_coord])
  end

Improvements Needed

Please feel free to submit patches for bug fixes and improvements. Specifically, I would like to:

1. Use something nicer than system(“convert blah…”), but couldn’t get it to work. I don’t think Minimagick supports compositing images, so RMagick may have to be used, but is it worth the heavy memory consumption?

2. Make it more flexible (i.e. accept background image and composite params dynamically instead of in badger.yml). Maybe pass them in the call to create_badge?

There have been several methods to deploy an Ruby on Rails application. Until recently, the most popular is to run Apache and proxy balance to multiple Mongrel instances that are running simultaneously.

Passenger, developed by Phusion, is the new kid entering the Rails deployment market. Everyone has been using the Apache PHP module for years and deploying a PHP applications is a snap. This has not been possible with Rails until Passenger. It is extremely easy, and you can still use Capistrano to automate deployment. I will show you how I get it to work on Ubuntu.

sudo gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module

Update: Phusion just released Passenger 2.0 RC 1. You can download this version and do gem install passenger-1.9.0.gem instead. But I had an error compiling it on Mac OS X Leopard. hongli pointed me to use the version from GitHub that has the fix and it works like a charm. Thanks Phusion guys.

To get it from GitHub:

git clone git://github.com/FooBarWidget/passenger.git

I created a separate /etc/apache2/mods-available/passenger.load and it contains the following:

For 1.0.5:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
RailsSpawnServer /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-1.0.5/bin/passenger-spawn-server
RailsRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby

For the GitHub version (Of course the path will look different depending on where your git clone is):

LoadModule passenger_module /home/rlaw/downloads/passenger/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /home/rlaw/downloads/passenger
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby

I then tell Apache to load the Passenger module:

a2enmod passenger

Now, I create a virtual host configuration for one of my Rails app in /etc/apache2/sites-available/myapp:

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@myapp.com
  ServerName myapp.com

  DocumentRoot /home/deploy/apps/myapp/current/public

  <Directory /home/deploy/apps/myapp/current/public>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
  </Directory>

  LogLevel warn
  ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/myapp/error.log
  CustomLog /var/log/apache2/myapp/access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I then restart Apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

When you need to restart your application because you have changed some code that Rails does not reload in production, just do:

touch /home/deploy/apps/myapp/current/tmp/restart.txt

I have not tried their Ruby Enterprise Edition yet. They claim substantial memory and speed improvement at RailsConf 2008, so it will be interesting to see how that develops.

The new Gem Dependencies of Rails 2.1 give developers an easier-than-ever ability to keep track of and maintain the various library dependencies inherent with any project. However, a much-overlooked additional feature of the Gem Dependencies is the ability to package traditional Rails plugins as a gem and have them hooked in properly. This article is designed as an introduction to how to write and use plugins as gems in Rails projects.

The Basics

The basic method by which this is achievable is that any plugin included through a config.gem command will automatically have the gem-packed file rails/init.rb run upon Rails’s initialization. All it takes is a little bit of effort, and any Rails plugin can be packaged as a gem and easily depended upon through gem dependencies.

You may be wondering why this is a “big deal.” Plugins are already dead simple to install in Rails (and you can even script/plugin install straight from Git now!), why do we need GemPlugins? It’s simple, really: RubyGems are a rock-solid established way of easily distributing versioned reusable bits of code. Using gems for plugins allows for a greater standardization of the way in which plugins are maintained and distributed, as well as a simple path for version-locking to ensure compatibility with legacy code etc.

Another reason that GemPlugins are important is that they provide a level of abstraction from Rails: by releasing a gem rails/init.rb you could also use the same exact code to release a Merb plugin or any other framework that supports gemified add-ons. I think you will begin to see a number of cross-framework plugins be developed as Rails gets some company and shares alike.

Using a GemPlugin

First, let’s go through the process required to use an existing gem plugin. I’m going to be using my Acts As Taggable On plugin as an example throughout because I just recently went through the process of making it available as a gem.

First, you will need to include the dependency in your environment.rb file. I’m assuming here that most plugins are going to be hosted on GitHub, but the same should be true for any gem source.

# in environment.rb

config.gem "mbleigh-acts-as-taggable-on", :source => "http://gems.github.com", :lib => "acts-as-taggable-on"

This is the standard usage of gem dependencies, and for more info on this you can see Ryan Daigle’s post or watch the RailsCast on the subject. Now assuming that you don’t already have the gem in question installed, it’s simple to grab it:

rake gems:install

This will automatically install any gem dependencies in your project, and will tell you what’s happening the same as if you had run gem install from the command line.

That’s it! Once you have successfully installed the necessary gem, you can simply start up your Rails server and the plugin will be loaded and initialized as though it were living in your vendor/plugins directory.

Now that you know how to use a GemPlugin, I’ll show you how you can take an existing plugin and gemify it quickly and painlessly.

Making a GemPlugin

Let’s say I have a plugin called awesome_fu that lives on GitHub at mbleigh/awesome-fu. I’ve already released this plugin, it works great, and now I want to make it compatible with GemPlugins.

First, let’s create a gemspec called awesome-fu.gemspec in line with the requirements for the GitHub Gem Repository. In order to make the file list, I usually find it’s easiest to “find **” in the plugin directory, then copy it into TextMate, make the modifications I need for manifest (using a regular expression to quote each of the files), and saving it in the spec. If you have only a few files in your plugin, it may be easier just to add them by hand.

Next we need to add rails/init.rb. This is a little bit troublesome, because we still want our plugin to work if installed through the traditional method, so we also need init.rb to run the same code (this is automatically fine in edge Rails). What I did for my plugin is copy all of my init.rb code into rails/init.rb and then change init.rb to the following:

require File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/rails/init"

Now they both run the same code without any kind of replication, great! This means that now I have set up my plugin to work equally as a GemPlugin or a traditional plugin with just a couple minutes of work.

All that’s left to do is switch on the RubyGem setting for my GitHub project, update the README, and push! Now anyone will be able to easily require the plugin as a gem dependency and you will get all of the accolades associated with releasing your plugin the “new and hip” way.

Caveat Coder

The one problem with GemPlugins that I have run into is that if you unpack your gems using “rake gems:unpack” the rails/init.rb file is not run on initialization. This is a known issue that is supposed (?) to be resolved but I have still experienced this problem in my experiments. Hopefully this issue will be fully resolved in edge Rails soon and the glorious future of GemPlugins can begin.

Acts As Taggable On (original post here), the tagging plugin with custom tag contexts, has gathered up some great new features over the past weeks thanks to the efforts of the community as well as fellow Intrideans Pradeep Elankumaran and Brendan Lim. I just wanted to take this opportunity to go over some of what’s new and interesting in the world of acts_as_taggable_on.

Community Fixes

First, Peter Cooper was kind enough to submit a patch that allows acts_as_taggable_on to work with Rails 2.1’s named_scope when using find_options_for_tag_counts.

Secondly, the much requested support for Single Table Inheritance is finally in! It was just a matter of using a class inheritable attribute instead of a class instance variable, and big thanks to slainer68 for hunting that down and taking the time to submit a patch.

If there’s anything you’ve hacked on to Acts As Taggable On, I urge you to submit a patch to the Lighthouse Project. I try to get new patches integrated into the codebase as quickly as possible, so please do submit anything!

During the Community Code Drive at RailsConf two great features were added: taggers and related objects.

Taggers

Tags can now have ownership, allowing for such things as User-tracked tags and more. This was a requested feature and something that I’d been looking forward to myself. Here’s the usage:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_tagger
end

class Photo < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_taggable_on :locations
end

@some_user.tag(@some_photo, :with => "paris, normandy", :on => :locations)
@some_user.owned_taggings
@some_user.owned_tags
@some_photo.locations_from(@some_user)

Find Related

Another request (and another great idea) is the ability to find related objects by similar tags. This is now available through the @object.find_related_on_tags syntax:

@bobby = User.find_by_name("Bobby")
@bobby.skill_list # => ["jogging", "diving"]

@frankie = User.find_by_name("Frankie")
@frankie.skill_list # => ["hacking"]

@tom = User.find_by_name("Tom")
@tom.skill_list # => ["hacking", "jogging", "diving"]

@tom.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Bobby">,<User name="Frankie">]
@bobby.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Tom">] 
@frankie.find_related_on_skills # => [<User name="Tom">] 

Gemified!

Acts As Taggable On now works as a GemPlugin in Rails. This is a new way (as of Rails 2.1) of distributing plugins as gems and having them still automatically link up and do their magic. To use it as a gem, add it to your config/environment.rb like so:

config.gem "mbleigh-acts-as-taggable-on", :source => "http://gems.github.com", :lib => "acts-as-taggable-on"

Now you should be able to get the latest version of the plugin just by running rake gems:install. However, this hasn’t been working for me so the alternative is just to install the gem directly:

gem install mbleigh-acts-as-taggable-on --source http://gems.github.com/

Now when you run your Rails app, even though it’s not in vendor/plugins it should be running! To make sure, look for this line on startup:

** acts_as_taggable_on: initialized properly

There are still a couple of issues outstanding in Rails regarding GemPlugins (if you unpack it, it will not run the initialization properly for some reason), but I wanted to give everyone the latest and greatest way to install the plugin possible. It will still work fine using the conventional methods as well.

Community and Future

I’ve been really happy with the response and support of the community, and I would like to do everything possible to cultivate future participation. To that end, I have created an Acts As Community Project for acts_as_taggable_on that will hopefully provide some casual communication about the project. Feel free to post on the wall or in the forums, and look out for additions soon.

Finally, the area of the plugin that still needs some work is tag caching. This is not a particular area of my expertise, so I’m hoping that someone from the community will write up some specs that flesh out the caching functionality in new and interesting ways.

Thanks for all of the patches, and I hope you continue to enjoy using Acts As Taggable On!

UPDATE (6/10/08): The improvements keep on rolling! After writing the post, I went off on a tangent and decided to make the plugin work both traditionally and as a gem. See more details above in the “Gemified” section.

That’s the most foul, cruel, and bad-tempered word you ever set eyes on!
Look, that word’s got a vicious streak a mile wide! It’s a killer!

There will be no killer words in this application: Behold the mighty Fu-fu! And there was much rejoicing… But first, a little history on Fu-fu: The Profanity Filter for Rails.

A Little History

Recently, I needed a simple (profanity/cuss/swear/bad word) filter for a Rails app, so I hit up Google for the answer as this seemed like a problem that should have been solved by an expert. Sadly, this was not the case.

Over the next day or so I was able to get a simple prototype up and running in our application and that’s the way it stayed for the next couple weeks. Then I realized that this was reason I wasn’t able to find a profanity filter plugin on Google.

Upon closer inspection it seems that people are building their own filters and leaving it at that. Almost being guilty of this, I decided that it was time to give back to the community and get a profanity filter plugin out in the wild.

I was able to publish the first version of the Profanity Filter during the Community Code Drive at RailsConf 2008. Hacking in the same room as DHH, David Chelimsky, Chad Fowler, Rich Kilmer, Marcel Molina Jr., and the entire Intridea team is a great motivator.

During RailsConf we decided that the plugin needed a real name; “Profanity Filter” wasn’t cutting it. Someone suggested fu-fu pronounced ‘eff-you-foo’. That was promptly shortened to ‘foo-foo’. How can you not love something named Fu-fu that deals with profanity and abuses plugin idioms at the same time?

Continue Rejoicing (Examples!)

The interface for Fu-fu is clean and straight forward. For example. lets say that ‘frak’ is a common curse word.

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  profanity_filter :title, :body
end

post = Post.create(:title => 'Fraking title', :body => 'What a bunch of frak')

post.title          #=> '@#$% title'
post.title_original #=> 'Fraking title'

post.body           #=> 'What a bunch of @#$%'
post.body_original  #=> 'What a bunch of frak'

By default the filter will replace common curses with the standard curse notation of ’@#$%’. Fu-fu is also has the ability to do dictionary replacements:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  profanity_filter :title, :body, :method => 'dictionary'
end

post = Post.create(:title => 'Fraking title', :body => 'What a bunch of frak')

post.title          #=> 'fr*k*ng title'
post.body           #=> 'What a bunch of fr*k'

Fu-fu comes with a default dictionary file that replaces all vowels with asterisks (*).

You can also add an exclamation point to the end of the filter call (profanity_filter!) and have the method save the filtered text to the database (although this is not recommended for most applications).

You can also call Fu-fu directly:

ProfanityFilter::Base.clean('frak')               #=> '@#$%'
ProfanityFilter::Base.clean('frak', 'dictionary') #=> 'fr*k

Todos and Fixes

But alas, there is still danger in Caerbannog. As with all things, there is room for improvement.

* better filter regex, doesn't currently catch things like 'f-r-a-k'
* needs support for multiple dictionaries and configuration
* needs support for different levels of filtering (prude, normal, weak, etc)

Installation

To install the Fu-fu: The Profanity Filter on Edge Rails or Rails 2.1 and greater:

script/plugin install git://github.com/adambair/fu-fu.git

On earlier versions of Rails:

git clone git://github.com/adambair/fu-fu.git vendor/plugins/fu-fu

Resources

Bug tracking is available through the Fu-fu Lighthouse project. Also, feel free to contribute. I’ll be happy to accept patches and push requests for reasonable fixes and additions as long as they come with test coverage.

The source code is available on GitHub.

For general discussion about the plugin, please use the forums and wall of Fu-Fu’s Acts As Community Profile

Thanks to the Intridea team for their time, contributions, and suggestions. I’ve had a great time building Fu-fu and I hope someone may find it useful.

The addition of RESTful routing and the #to_param method in Rails has undoubtedly improved both the ease and usefulness of URL generation in Rails apps. However, there has come to be a rather insidious tendency to have an auto-generated id as the true reference for a given item. This may make sense for some or even many apps, but by and large records should be referred to by their content, not their ids, in URLs if at all possible. With this goal in mind, I have released from_param, a simple addition to ActiveRecord that makes it dead simple to use better URL finders.

Example

First of all, from_param is meant to simply be the complement of to_param, that is, you should be able to pass Model.from_param(some_parameter) the same way you would pass Model.from_xml(some_xml). Let’s examine how this works in practice:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    "#{id}-#{login.downcase}" 
  end
end

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  # GET /users/1-mbleigh
  def show
    @user = User.from_param(params[:id]) # => <User id=1 login="mbleigh">
  end
end

Simple enough, and it should look very familiar except that instead of a User.find or User.find_by_id, we have User.from_param. In fact, that’s exactly what this code does: from_param by default will call find_by_id since that is how the default to_param is configured.

Now let’s take something a little more complicated: a blog post title. I definitely don’t want an id in the URL if it’s a permalink, so how can I make an arbitrary parameter found as easily as the id? Simple, just add a param column to your table! Take a look:

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  def to_param
    "#{created_at.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")}-#{title.gsub(" ","-").downcase.gsub(/[^a-z0-9-]/,"")}" 
  end
end

class PostsController < ApplicationController
  # GET /posts/2008-04-26-from-param-plugin-released
  @post = Post.from_param(params[:id]) # => <Post title="From Param: Plugin Released" created_at="2008-04-26">
end

From Param will auto-magically save the to_param of your model to the specified parameter column (defaults to “param” but you can set it by calling set_param_column) and then automatically know to find by that column if it exists when from_param is called. This way, all you have to do is define a to_param that will be unique to your record and everything else is handled for you!

This plugin is really quite simple, but it establishes a convention that I feel has been missing from Rails for some time: a standard method to call to retrieve a record based on its URL parameter.

Installation

To install the plugin on Edge Rails or Rails 2.1 and greater:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/from_param.git

On earlier versions of Rails:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/from_param.git vendor/plugins/from_param

Resources

If you have any suggestions for expanding the usefulness of the plugin or run into any problems, please report them on the From Param Lighthouse Project.

The issue of pre-loading needed data for a Rails application has always been somewhat confusing and difficult. A great post on Rail Spikes discusses the issue in-depth and offers a number of different solutions, but ultimately they all seem just a little short of the desired simplicity. By combining a few of the ideas and adding a few of my own, I have created a seeding system that I feel is very straightforward and easy to use.

Borrowing the basic premise of the db-populate plugin, Seed Fu is based around loading ruby scripts located in db/fixtures via a Rake task. What db-populate doesn’t offer is a clear syntax for describing the records to be seeded. That’s where Seed Fu comes in.

Usage

First, just create a new ruby script in db/fixtures (and create the directory itself, obviously). Any script that you drop in this folder will be automatically run when you execute your seeding rake task. Additionally, you can load environment-specific data by adding scripts in a folder of the same name (i.e. db/fixtures/development. In these scripts you can execute arbitrary Ruby code with the full Rails environment loaded; however, you should remember that this code will be executed every time the rake task is called and should not cause duplication or destroy anything that can’t be retrieved. The syntax for Seed Fu works as follows (with a User model as an example):

# db/fixtures/users.rb
# put as many seeds as you like in

User.seed(:login, :email) do |s|
  s.login = "admin" 
  s.email = "admin@adminnerson.com" 
  s.first_name = "Bob" 
  s.last_name = "Bobson" 
end

User.seed(:login, :email) do |s|
  s.login = "michael" 
  s.email = "michael@abc.com" 
  s.first_name = "Michael" 
  s.last_name = "Bleigh" 
end

The seed method is available on any ActiveRecord. It takes as parameters the ‘constraints’ for that seeding; in other words, the fixed attributes that will not change in the record’s life. The constraints are used to find the record and update instead of creating it with the attributes provided if it already exists. This way your seeds can change without mucking with other live data on your server.

Once you have set up your fixtures, it’s simple to run them:

rake db:seed

Or if you want to run them for a targeted environment:

rake db:seed RAILS_ENV=production

Installation

In edge Rails or Rails 2.1 and beyond:

script/plugin install git://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu.git

In previous versions of Rails:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/seed-fu.git vendor/plugins/seed-fu

I have some ideas for the expansion of this plugin (loading from CSV for larger datasets, etc.), so stay tuned! If you have ideas for additional features or encounter any problems, I have set up a Lighthouse project for your enjoyment.

Having had to develop apps that relied on the ability to send text messages to members, I thought that it would be a good idea to turn some of that functionality into a plugin that would be easy to use. SMS Fu gives you the ability to be able to send text messages from your Rails app in less than five minutes. There’s no third-party gateway needed, as the phone number is converted into an e-mail address, which makes it deliverable to any phone.

Installation

git clone git://github.com/brendanlim/sms-fu.git vendor/plugins/sms_fu

Usage

Supported Carriers: Alltel, Ameritech, AT&T, BellSouth Mobility, BlueSkyFrog, Boost Mobile, Cellular South, Fido, Metro PCS, PSC Wireless, Qwest, Southern Link, Sprint, Suncom, T-Mobile (US/UK/Germany), Virgin Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone (UK,Italy,Japan)

To use SMS Fu, all you have to do is include SMS Fu in one of your controllers.

class ExampleController < ApplicationController
  include SMSFu
end

After this, go to /config/sms_fu.yml to change the default reply-to address with your own.

Phone numbers must not include any non-numeric characters, with the exception of ’+’ for International numbers. The three required parameters are the phone number, carrier, and the message itself. To find out just what you need to pass for the carrier, check the yaml file. The one line below will deliver a nice ‘Hello World!’ straight to your phone.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Hello World!")

Since most non smart-phones only support up to 128 characters, you’re allowed to specify a limit to truncate the message delivered.

deliver_sms("5555555555","AT&T","Really long message ...", :limit => 128)

If you feel like rolling your own mailer, and not using SMS Fu to handle this, you can retrieve the the converted e-mail address for the phone number and carrier supplied.

get_sms_address("5555555555","AT&T")

That’s all there is to it! If you want to add your own carriers, just edit sms_fu.yml.

When writing an application there’s a number of times where it can be very useful to know whether or not a user has seen or accessed a piece of information. I recently had to write a solution to such a need and have wrapped up the result in a plugin for your enjoyment.

ActsAsReadable allows you to create a generic relationship of items which can be marked as ‘read’ by users. This is useful for forums or any other kind of situation where you might need to know whether or not a user has seen a particular model.

Installation

To install the plugin just install from the GitHub repository:

git clone git://github.com/mbleigh/acts-as-readable.git vendor/plugins/acts_as_readable

You will need the readings table to use this plugin. A generator has been included, simply type

script/generate acts_as_readable_migration

to get the standard migration created for you.

Example

class Post < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_readable
end

bob = User.find_by_name("bob")

bob.readings                      # => []

Post.find_unread_by(bob)          # => [<Post 1>,<Post 2>,<Post 3>...]
Post.find_read_by(bob)            # => []

Post.find(1).read_by?(bob)        # => false
Post.find(1).read_by!(bob)        # => <Reading 1>
Post.find(1).read_by?(bob)        # => true
Post.find(1).users_who_read       # => [<User bob>]

Post.find_unread_by(bob)          # => [<Post 2>,<Post 3>...]
Post.find_read_by(bob)            # => [<Post 1>]

bob.readings                      # => [<Reading 1>]

And that’s all there is to it! It’s not an incredibly complex set of features, but I find it to be a pretty useful one. If you have any questions or issues, please feel free to post them on the public Trac

Today Intridea launched the private beta of acts_as_community, a community site for Ruby and Rails developers.

acts_as_community is a place for Rubyists and Rails developers to gather and interact. Our hope is to bring the community closer together in collaboration and communication so that everyone can benefit from others' experiences.

If you would like to join email us at aac@intridea.com for the beta key.