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June 2007 Archives

Advanced Rails Recipes

Posted by Marty Haught on Jun 09, 2007Comments

About a month ago Chad Fowler asked me if I might have any advanced Rails recipes that I’d be willing to submit to his new book (with Mike Clark) of the same title for the Pragmatic Programmers. I thought about it and came up with several potential recipes from my current Rails project. I didn’t really discriminate much on the recipes trusting Chad to filter through the ones that they were too simple, had already been covered or plain just weren’t worth anything. Well, I got the official response yesterday that they’d like two of those ideas to become recipes. Of course, the deadline is looming as I have until early July to get them both done. Luckily when I decided to submit these recipes I bounced the ideas off my fellow co-worker Andy Kappen and together we’ll write up them up. Given that this will be my first official submission to a book, it’s pretty exciting. Wish me luck! No doubt I’ll be posting more about the recipes here as we work them out.

Dynamic Nav extension

Posted by Marty Haught on Jun 09, 2007Comments

When I had put together the shepherdvalley.org website in Radiant, I needed a way to generate a dynamic navigation that could display children pages easily. While the stock Radius tags that come in Radiant get you very close, there was one tag missing. After an online chat with Sean Cribbs he suggested I write a simple tag called if_ancestors_or_self. We worked through the code together and I made a super small extension that just contained this tag. Now this should probably be included in core Radiant but it hasn’t been yet. However, lately some others have expressed interest in this so I decided to package it up for public consumption. If you would like to use this tag or just look at how I put it together (I did mention it was simple, right?) feel free to download it.

dynamic_nav.zip