Handling rails plugins as application plugins

[Dan Coutu]

Since I've been making lots of 'portal-ish' rails apps lately the idea
has been brewing in my brain to create a generic rails portal framework
that can be used as a starting point for deploying new portals quickly
with minimum fuss and development time.

Many other web applications designed for general use and flexibility
have a plugin mechanism that allows you to drop into place some code
modules that provide extra functionality that becomes immediately
available to the web application.

The rails plugin concept provides code modules that are immediately
available for use but in a different way. In this case it relies on the
developer to know that the plugin is available and to then write code
that uses the plugin. There is no auto-recognition of the new
functionality that makes user visible changes within the rails application.

Has anyone run across something that provides or enables a cross between
the two types of plugin concepts?

Thanks,

Dan

[Nick Plante]

Radiant (CMS) and Spree (shopping cart) are both Rails-based apps that
have a concept of 'pluggable extensions' similar to what you're
talking about. Adva CMS is also doing some of this, I think, but is
aiming to be a bit more full-featured like some of the popular PHP
'portals' out there. Haven't used Spree or Adva myself, but might be
worth a look.

http://radiantcms.org/
http://spreecommerce.com/
http://github.com/svenfuchs/adva_cms/tree/master

..nap

[Dan Coutu]

Nick, thanks. I've investigated both Radiant and Adva to some extent and
haven't heard of Spree before. Another promising Rails CMS that I really
like is BrowserCMS in case people are taking notes.

So far Adva has a long ways to go before it is truly useful for
production sites. I like the general architecture and the approach that
they're using but it is just too young so far.

Radiant is fairly nice but tends to be too restrictive (not flexible
enough for my taste) with regard to what you can actually do with it.

I'll check out Spree and see what it has to offer, thanks!

Dan

[Dan Coutu]

What I was looking for originally turns out to be something more along
the lines of this:

Use rails engines to provide the plugin extension capability.

Of course I'm simplifying but you get the idea. If not then read up on
engines and you will.

Dan

[Nick Plante]

Hi Dan,

Yup, I'm familiar with Engines. Jeff Rafter has been working on a CMS
engine called 'spreadhead' http://github.com/jeffrafter/spreadhead
Haven't used it myself yet so I don't know how far along it is. Might
be worth checking out though if that's the sort of thing you're
looking for.

..nap