Get an arbitrary collection from gems?

Rails
1

Hi,

I’m looking to do something though I’m not quite sure how to phrase
it. What I’m looking to do is, essentially, make custom hooks using
plugins/engines/gems.

My use case is a member dashboard:

I have a view partial for my site and a number of gems that I wrote
installed. Each gem correlates to something a member can manage, like
a photo gallery, their profile, their friends, etc.

Now, I know I could open up my view partial and code links to each one
of these things, eg:

Manage Photos

But, I was hoping for something slightly more modular, and was hoping
I could figure out some way to hook these links in dynamically when I
install my gem and or run my generators.

In other CMS’ I have used, this was possible. Wordpress for example
had a hook, and Magento had an XML based admin navigation when the
links to manage your account were dynamically populated.

What would be a way to go about this in Rails? I’ve thought of making
a db table and writing to it with seeds when I run each gem’s
generators. But I was hoping something simpler. Is there some way I
could essentially get a collection from my gems’ lib files?

2

W/ the help of someone in IRC (), i did it like this…

I put this in my main Gem
module DevapeMemberNavigation
mattr_accessor :items
self.items = []
module Hooks
def register_navigation_item(item)
DevapeMemberNavigation.items << item
end
end
end

module DevapeCms
extend DevapeMemberNavigation::Hooks
end

DevapeCms.register_navigation_item(’/member/posts’)

In another Gem, I wrote
require “devape_cms”

module DevapeSurvey
extend DevapeMemberNavigation::Hooks
end

DevapeSurvey.register_navigation_item(’/member/surveys’)

Then, in my main app, this will return the desired array <%=
DevapeMemberNavigation.items %>