Customising Engines views without breaking update?

Rails
1

Hi all,

Are Engines really any good for distribution of functionality including
views?

That is I have an engine I downloaded and have working, however the
first thing I want to do is alter the view pages in terms of how it lays
thiings out. As soon as I do this however (as I do this in the engine
install area under plugins) I assume I’m breaking the concept for
upgrade.

a) So assuming you’re the type that wants to tailor/adjust the views is
Engines really a good way to handle this?

b) If one is going to adjust an Engine is it potentially better just to
import it directly into your own applicaiton working area and
acknowledge there’s been a lot of view changes?

c) Or is it best to leave it in the vendor area then at least it could
be a re-usable engine from the point of view of your own applications
(assuming the view layout changes you made would be those which you’d be
happy to have across all your applications)

Thanks

2

I was under the impression that Engines were perfect for this kind of
thing,
mainly in that to change the files an Engine uses, you just create your
own
in your apps app/views/engine_name. The engine should pick up those
files
and use them instead of its own.

Jason

3

oh…must have missed this…sounds good for a small number of tweaks.
What do you think however if you want to tweak just about every view
(i.e.
*.rhtml) from the engine to give it the look and feel you want?

4

Greg,

You might ask this on the Engines mailing list.

That said, if it’s really just “tweaks” that you want, can you get
them by changing some of the engine’s CSS definitions?

5

good points - actually I’m not sure how much I want to tweak things, but
just I don’t really like the layout at the moment - I should look more
closely at CSS as a possibility agreed :slight_smile: