This is a half-baked idea that I’m looking to start while I look for my
next contract Rails job. It will eventually be both a resource for the
community, and another example of my Rails aptitude.
I’m thinking about building a wiki-like site that would give people a
place to find and share Rails code snippets for how to do things in
Rails. I’ll start out by providing lots of obvious newbie stuff, and
hopefully others will contribute over time to make it a useful resource
for anyone looking for a “how do I do this in Rails”? question. I find
having example code that I can copy/paste/modify to be a really helpful
thing when programming.
My plan is to organize the site such that for each “entry”, there will
be some or all of the following:
- a “tags” section for the author to give both a descriptive phrase and
some tags to help others find this particular bit of example code - separate tabbed panes for Model, View, and Controller code associated
with this sample - probably one more tab above for “notes”.
- this tabbed area will be ajaxed so user can quickly flip between the
tabs
It will be a wiki, in that anybody can either add another sample, or
modify an existing sample.
Somebody looking for a sample will be able to search for it using tags.
I’m just starting to design this thing, so I’m open to well-intentioned
suggestions. Are there any particular features not mentioned above that
you think would improve this sort of a site?
Also, I’m a bit undecided on how to do the text in each view. I
actually rather loath all of the different “textile” offshoots I’ve
tried to use in other wikis. I’m debating writing my own specifically
geared towards creation and display of Rails code, to deal with the
various ruby and html coding that people will want to enter. Not sure,
for instance, how to display normal looking rhtml without having the
browser try to parse it and without having security issues out the
yin-yang. Any suggestions on how to tackle this part of the project
would be very welcome.
thanks,
jp