Comments on: Rails Tip Roundup

By: cheapRoc

cheapRoc — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 16:04:29 +0000

Screw RedCloth… Textile is not as beautiful as Markdown. We use Markdown for our multipart email notifications coming out of our Rails apps. If they want plain text, Markdown looks AMAZING in that… if they want HTML, well Markdown also has you covered.

RDiscount is screaming fast as well.

By: Tim

Tim — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 21:34:25 +0000

Jeremy, nice submit_title helper – I like that.

I also think you have a good idea on creating a more generic markup helper, but for me I’m pretty well comfortable with RedCloth.

I have indeed played with both permalink_fu and acts_as_slugable, but sometimes I just need a simply solution for a single model and I’d rather not bring their full functionality in to achieve it.

Thanks for the great points.

By: Dave Newton

Dave Newton — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:11:55 +0000

The submit button is a perfect place for a small helper that encapsulates the condition: much cleaner, and as you note, a simple-but-useful usability enhancement.

By: Jeremy Weiskotten

Jeremy Weiskotten — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 17:43:50 +0000

Good tips. I’d like suggest a few small improvements.

Your conditional button code could be extracted into a reusable helper:

def submit_title(object, type=object.class.name.titleize)
(object.new_record? ? “Create ” : “Update “) + type
end

# Create Customer / Update Customer
# Create Client / Update Client

For your RedCloth helper, I recommend naming your helper something more generic, like “markup”. That way you can swap in a different markup parser if you want to without having references to the old one all over your code. I think this is a good idea even if you use the textililze (or markdown) helpers.

For permalinks, have you seen the permalink_fu plugin? There are a couple other plugins out there as well.

By: Corey Martella

Corey Martella — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:12:35 +0000

write_attribute: never knew this existed and it makes perfect sense. So helpful when you want to overload a setter method with some data normalization or secondary ops. Thanks for pointing it out!