Carson Workshops – Cameron Moll

Oct 142006

So yesterday I went to a Carson Workshop called Designing Elegant CSS Interfaces presented by Cameron Moll at a place called the Energy Clinic on Commerical Street just up the road from me in East London. To be honest I had little to no idea what to expect. I’m not a graphic designer by trade and that was clearly who the course was aimed at.

The course contained 6 hours of material from Cameron based around the following 6 areas:

  1. History of Computing UI
  2. Choosing an Approach
  3. Interface Essentials
  4. Managing Complexity
  5. CSS Proficiency
  6. Finessing Your Skills

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Ajax Scaffold Plugin v3.2.2 Released

Oct 022006

I released a new version of the plugin today that fixes a few outstanding issues and adds 3 new extension points. The main things that have been fixed are:

  1. Single table inheritance now works
  2. Legacy table names are now supported
  3. The table formats properly under IE

The 3 extra extra extension points are

  1. do_new
  2. do_edit
  3. do_delete

I will update the post on extending the plugin to fully cover these new features.

ResourceFeeder in Rails 1.1.6

Sep 282006

So you’ve seen Ryan Daigle’s article on ResourceFeeder and you want all that RSS goodness. However, you are using Rails 1.1.6 and don’t want to move to edge at the moment.

All you need to do is install the ResourceFeeder and SimplyHelpful plugins:

./script/plugin install resource_feeder
./script/plugin install simply_helpful

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Rails Conf Europe

Sep 162006

So RailsConf Europe is over, and it was great. There is a slight possibility I may of overdone it, a bit too much burning the candle at both ends but, hey it is the weekend now!!

I had originally intended to post from inside the conference. However, the fact that I couldn’t get the wifi to work in the main auditorium kind of scuppered that. My next plan was to write up anything useful at the end of the day. However, beer scuppered that. So I then gave up on that and decided to post on Friday evening after the event. So, here I am Saturday morning grabbing a full english in the pub over the road from my house – I love it when a plan comes together!!!

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Ajax Scaffold Plugin v3.2.0 Released

Sep 132006

So before I head off for the first event on my Rails Conf Europe calendar – Pizza on Rails (sponsored by Cominded). I thought I would mention that Richard White and myself have now released version 3.2.0 of the ajax scaffold plugin. This fixes a few bugs and a compatibility problem with generators before version 3.1.6.

The wiki contains links to various bits of documentation for both the plugin and the generator. Plugin specific posts from myself can be found here

Right, free beer and pizza……

Extending the Ajax Scaffold Plugin

Sep 062006

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

The aim of this post is to show how to extend or replace the default functionality of the Ajax Scaffold plugin (ASp). I will go over two areas, firstly how you filter the dataset the table displays, and secondly the methods you can override to really gain control.

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Custom Columns for the Ajax Scaffold Plugin

Sep 052006

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

One of the first things you will probably notice with the Ajax Scaffold plugin (ASp) is that works great if all you want to do is display a table showing all the fields a model has to offer. However, suppose we want to produce a table showing values that come from user defined methods on a model.

For example lets take a User model with the following fields: name, password, created_at, number_of_logins. To create a table that simply shows these fields is easy, simply add the following to the UsersController:

ajax_scaffold: user

but suppose we want one of the columns to contain only the name and the average number of logins per week / per month / per year….

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Getting Started with the Ajax Scaffold Plugin

Sep 022006

AjaxScaffold has been deprecated in favour of ActiveScaffold

Install

The easiest way to install the plugin version of Ajax Scaffold (AS) is to use the inbuilt Rails installer script. Simply run the following command from the root of your Rails app:

ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/ajaxscaffoldp/trunk

This will fetch the plugin into ‘vendor/plugins’. The files required by the plugin (views, css and js) will then be copied over to the app on startup.

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Ajax Scaffold Plugin v3.1.5 Released

Sep 022006

Richard White and I now have the first version of the Ajax Scaffold plugin ready. It is available from the RubyForge svn repository. Details of how to get it can be found here

There is also now a wiki covering both the plugin and the generator.

Web Design Meetup / YUI

Aug 172006

Had a great evening last night at the Web Design Meetup on Great Portland St in London. Simon Willison gave a very interesting talk (even the lack of a functioning projector didn’t detract) on the Yahoo javascript / AJAX libraries that have been open sourced for us to all enjoy (there are his notes from a previous but similar presentation here, Simon is obviously a bit of an evangalizer for the Yahoo UI libraries and why not…)

Niklas Richardson also gave a speed introduction to Flex 2, which despite my general opinion of Flash I have to admit was very impressive.

In following up on these people I then came across the Brit Pack page which has some very interesting people / sites / info. Check it out.

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