Extending Rails: Understanding and Creating Plugins
I gave this talk at O’Reilly’s Open Source Conference 2008. This was a 3 hour talk, the longest I’ve done. It covered a wide area, ranging from how to install Rails plugins to detailed walkthroughs of plugin code. It was hard to make it accessible for a very wide audience, but I hope there was something in each section for people of every level of Rails ability.
I recorded the talk, and have the video available online. I removed the question sections, as they were short and hard to hear, but it’s otherwise complete.
There are many plugins and resources mentioned in the talk, and I’ve linked to them here.
Resources
- Download the slides and the code used at GitHub.
- Plugin Patterns for Rails 2 by Andrew Stewart
- Rails Plugins by James Adam
- Rick Olson’s (Technoweenie) weblog
- Agile Web Development’s Rails plugin page
- Rails wiki page on plugins
- Blog post on Mr Bones, gem creation helper