Handling Large Scale Applications with tabnav/widets

[glennswest]

Interesting "issue". I'm now moving up to larger and larger
applications. And of course
tabnav is in my kit, as my standard "menu" of choice. Then I would
"edit" the automatically generated tabnav. Of course this got to be a
problem if I ran the conversion more than once,
since I lost any changes, this was always "painful"

My traditional solution is to "generate" a base menu automatically
when I start "importing" tables.
(In case you havent guess I do alot of conversion work).

Which is a fine "starting" point, since you can always "cut" and
"paste" to the appropriate level.
But now, its got to the point that the application is just "too"
large. 500+ tables, models and
controllers. The "empty" database is 60+ megabytes.

So the "answer" I think is to do a "content" manager that is "tabnav/
widget" compatible.
I've already started, but the lovely part is I use a "standalone"
database, so the "menu"
does not polute your database. And I will automatically generate the
"menus".
Using a activescaffold plugin, I also give you controllers that can
let you edit and update the
menus. The nice part you can "delete" the controllers, they will
"disappear" from the menu,
and you can "recreate" and they will reappear. I also have "role"
field that will allow a
interface to rolerequirement.

One I finish I intend to do a plugin and release it.

Thought wishes?

Sample and Further Writeup:
http://mentalpagingspace.blogspot.com/2008/02/rails-menu-problem-handling-large-scale.html