views:

369

answers:

6

What behavior have you had to implement in your Rails applications that you feel could exist nicely as a plugin?

What plugin functionality have you searched for in the past but couldn't find?

What existing Rails plugins could be improved or extended, and how?

+2  A: 

I once wrote a component for an application that did uploaded a zip of photos to an application so they didn't have to be done one by one, I think I may make that into a plugin when I have time, well a new version of it, the code's a little ugly.

railsninja
Why not use a client-side solution like SWFUpload, so they can uploading many images or whole directories at once, as well as providing a progress bar?
Luke
I thought about that and it wasn't a good solution for that problem as there were thousands of images going up, and the easiest way to do this was to zip them all. I've had other situations where that might be useful so I've considered implementing it as plugin, less images I may have used swfupload
railsninja
Also by doing this we were able to implement a drop box style upload and not tie up a rails application process for the lengthy upload which I think is good practise so that the app can focus on requests and use a background process, this time a rake task, can handle long running processes
railsninja
I'd like to have such a plugin, too
Gaetan Dubar
A: 

I'd like to see some sort of in-built video playback/streaming. I need it for my current project.

alamodey
How's this - http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/forum/General-Chat/15623/JW-Player-4-3-Ruby-on-Rails-Plugin
DanSingerman
Cool, will give it a go.
alamodey
+2  A: 

Not easy to answer. Everyone is biased towards his own current projects. Additionally a lot of great plugins already exists.

Personally I would like to see some menu plugin for a typical data base application. E.g. where there are few user roles, and every user role has different rights. And a main menu with sub menu which depends on user's rights to actions.

A (CSS) menu is reimplemented in almost every data base application. It is rather given application specific thing and I don't know how hard it would be to implement some general solution or template.

Greg Dan
+5  A: 

I'd like to see an engines plugin that dropped in an admin interface that provided a dashboard summary of all the models in the app, with configurable activity charts.

srboisvert
A: 

A Credit Card Payment System

Right now, no one bothers implementing credit card payments until a site has become "production quality". Single-person projects or small startups don't bother making this at first b/c they would much rather spend their time prototyping new, hard, or interesting features.

This is bad in the long-run for everyone, including end-users, b/c the default is to offer (often innovative and really great) services for free, which means only already-funded teams or people with lots of extra time can even get to the point of making something.

If this existed, were packaged up neatly, and were as dead-simple as Rails scaffolding, small projects could default to whatever payment scheme that actually made sense -- like pay-per-use, donations, trial periods, first 5 free, etc. -- making it possible to fund the really great products out there, instead of forcing them to rely on outside funding or ads, which ruins the product.

In a real physical store, people expect to pay. If the person on the other side of the counter gives me something for free (w/o buying anything at all), I say "Are you serious??" and walk away bewildered. But online, I almost expect it. This is bad! Because now everyone expects it, and people trying to make great things can't focus on actually doing that b/c they are too busy trying to figure out how to make it great and free.

Oftentimes, there are free things out there online that I like so much that I would like to pay for, but there's simply no easy way to do it. And I'm not alone. I use tipjoy and have donated to things that have a PayPal donation setup like Auditorium, but I don't see these as adequate.

The best thing out there that I've seen is RailsKits. But as far as I understand, they aren't packaged properly so that I can add them to my site whenever I please like a plugin or gem.

Jonathan Tran
Have you tried http://www.activemerchant.org/?
Ian Terrell
It may work for one-time charges, but I was thinking about something more complicated that can be charged periodically, for example, so I still think there is lots of room for improvement.
Jonathan Tran
A: 

I agree with Greg... there are lots of great plugins, and lots of great ideas for more.

I think there's always a need for more web APIs to be supported. As we go forward with API driven services and semantic web, there's tons of work to be done on that front.

http://www.programmableweb.com/ is a great starting point for thinking about what really useful APIs don't have a rails plugin or ruby gem yet.

Cheers!

Walt

Walt Gordon Jones