BenCurtis.com

I finally finished bringing over the remaining plugins from the wiki to the plugin directory, bringing the number of plugins to over 150. The directory also has a few that aren’t on the wiki page.

It’s pretty cool to look over all those plugins and see just how much effort is being contributed to Ruby on Rails. Here’s a big “thank you” to all those who have made those contributions. I know my projects have benefited from all that hard work.

Another change I made to the plugin directory this week was adding support for RDoc markup in the description, including being able to fetch the README file from the plugin SVN repository, RDoc-ify it, and stuff it into the description when creating a plugin. This was a request from Geoffrey Grosenbach, to help plugin authors save some time and not have to write another description for their plugins.

Ideas and suggestions for the Rails plugin directory are always welcome. It’s been fun working on this project, and it’s a pleasure to give a little back to the community via this resource.

By popular demand, the Rails plugin directory now has tagging support.

When you view a plugin, such as acts_as_authenticated, you will see a Tags section where all the tags that have been added to the plugin are listed, as well as a box for adding your own tags. The tag box is ajax-ified, of course, with the added bonus of graceful degredation complements of respond_to.

Searching on tags is simple… just use the plugin search box. If you only want to see plugins specifically tagged with a tag, and not the ones that also match based on search, then you can specify the tag in the url, like so: http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/tag/login.

But wait! There’s more!

If you go to a specific tag URL like http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/tag/login, you’ll notice an RSS link at the bottom of the page (and auto-detected by your browser) for a feed that gets updated when plugins get tagged with that tag. In this case, that feed would be http://agilewebdevelopment.com/feeds/tag/login.

And all of this plugin goodness is free, free, free! What more could you want?

The Rails plugin directory now has an XML API. Based on inspiration from David’s article, Discovering HTTP #1: The Accept header, all of the views now have a respond_to block that will return the HTML with layout to a browser or XML to a client specifying application/xml for the Accept header. Now we just need someone to write a plugin for Textmate to use the directory to find plugins. :)

For plugin authors, I’ve added a bit of RESTful goodness. If you PUT an XML blob (see the sample XML file) to http://agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/new, you can script the publishing of your plugins. Since there’s a fair number of people watching the plugin feed, this is an effective and pain-free way to get the word out about your new plugin.