Once upon a time, the Rails community was pretty open and friendly and one could easily visit the rubyonrails irc channel at freenode to get a ton of help. Its still possible to get help from the irc channel these days but you have to be ready to put up with people who aren’t too friendly. Its filled with geeks who automatically assume you’re an idiot and will treat you as such. I just spent a few minutes in the channel probing about why there’s no consistent taggable plugin. There is the acts_as_taggable gem, the acts_as_taggable plugin, the acts_as_taggable_on_steroids plugin, and even the has_many_polymorphs. The problem is that apparently the acts_as_taggable gem and plugin are deprecated but the other two don’t offer any useful functions. You have to make them all yourself. Neither are much use as a plugin as of this writing. Both require you to write a bunch of your own basic methods like related tags. Another problem is that neither has a friendly RDoc type api published anywhere. As it was so kindly pointed out to me on the rubyonrails irc channel, I am just being an idiot and could easily just read the source code to find out all the methods and what they do. The Rails community, at least in irc, has really degenerated over the past few years and from the looks of the current state of tagging in Rails, so has the code and documentation that is produced.

I’m still undecided on which direction I should head. I’ve already got a half-baked solution using the act_as_taggable plugin so I’m leaning towards just adding the few extra methods I need to it. Its either that or rewrite my tagging code another way which will be deprecated in a few months anyway. A decent tagging plugin for Rails is a void waiting to be filled. Any takers?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 19th, 2007 at 3:25 pm and is filed under Ruby on Rails, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.