Rails and Plugins

Rails is great, and plugins make it even better. Except when they don't.

I've been doing a lot with Bookton on the weekends. It's changed my opinion somewhat of plugins for Rails. Today's experience is a good example.

I was adding TinyMCE to the system. The easy way is the TinyMCE Plugin. The only problem is that it doesn't work, at least not in Rails 1.2.3. What probably happened is that the plugin was written several point releases ago, and it just hasn't been updated yet. I could spend a lot of time trying to figure it out...

Or I could just copy the TinyMCE directory in to my project, add a couple of lines of javascript to my main layout and call it a day. This is what I did. This is what I do for about half the plugins that I use. The other half, I have to say, work well with no big issues. (acts_as_ferret is great)

I'm still a rather large fan of Rails, but the rose tint is starting to fade off from the standard issue goggles.