The Basics of Creating Rails Plugins

Pretend for a moment that you are an avid bird watcher. Your favorite bird is the Yaffle, and you want to create a plugin that allows other developers to share in the Yaffle goodness.

In this tutorial you will learn how to create a plugin that includes:

Core Extensions - extending String with a to_squawk method:
```
# Anywhere
"hello!".to_squawk # => "squawk! hello!"
```

An acts_as_yaffle method for ActiveRecord models that adds a squawk method:

class Hickwall < ActiveRecord::Base
  acts_as_yaffle :yaffle_text_field => :last_sang_at
end

Hickwall.new.squawk("Hello World")

A view helper that will print out squawking info:
```
squawk_info_for(@hickwall)
```
A generator that creates a migration to add squawk columns to a model:
```
script/generate yaffle hickwall
```

A custom generator command:

class YaffleGenerator < Rails::Generator::NamedBase
  def manifest
    m.yaffle_definition
  end
end

A custom route method:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  map.yaffles
end

In addition you'll learn how to:

test your plugins.
work with init.rb, how to store model, views, controllers, helpers and even other plugins in your plugins.
create documentation for your plugin.
write custom Rake tasks in your plugin.

1. Preparation »

Chapters

The Basics of Creating Rails Plugins