MARTYHAUGHT

I’ve just posted the newest release of YUI4Rails, 0.1.1. I’ve upgraded the plugin to YUI 2.5.1 and have applied Bryan Donovan’s datatable patch. Several of you have contacted me on how to take things forward. In effort to make things a bit easier I’ve made a git repository of the plugin that is cloned off the RubyForge svn repo. You can find it here: http://github.com/mghaught/yui4rails/tree/master

We’ve got some new components that we’ve been developing lately. Carousel, lightbox and tooltip are close to being ready. One thing that has come up from this is that we’ve got some limitations with the current approach of including dependencies. I’m working on a new prototype that would ease this pain and output much nicer html/script tags. I’ll be pushing it to the github repository either tonight or this weekend. It will be in its own branch for the time being.

The basic idea is that you would have one helper call in the head section of your layout. You could declare components that all pages would need such as reset or fonts. Then in each individual template you can invoke the widget helpers as needed. They would in turn call an AssetManager class to indicate what dependencies they have on YUI assets. Additionally, javascript code that belongs in the head section will be outputted there, even though you are invoking it throughout your templates or partials. The end result should be cleaner html and javascript with less hassle calling helper methods.

I have several other things on the horizon for the plugin. First, several other developers have contacted me about contributing to the plugin so look for those additions in the coming weeks on the github repository. As we get closer to a stable release we’ll push up to the Rubyforge svn repo and post new release files. Part of this process will involve more discussion on YUI4Rails’ mailing list on design philosophies so we can keep a cohesive plugin. I welcome your comments and suggestions so we can build the best possible plugin. Second, we’re going to start working on improving documentation, tutorials and an official YUI4Rails website with access to all of it. It’s time to make this plugin more user-friendly. The other important thing is to have this plugin well tested. While the nature of js based widgets makes testing incredibly difficult, I think we can provide some test coverage for how our helpers operate. I’ll try to expand on this in another email/blog post in the future. So enjoy this new release and don’t be afraid to join the mailing list or fork the github repo.

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