Finding active_admin a little too big?

[adamakhtar]

@codereading/readers

Its a beast! but im sure i can get through it all. Im still spending time figuring out how engines work, how rails pulls them in and some of the problems an engine developer would face. One challenge is how do you work with a user object that's defined in your hosts app. You can't just assume it's of a User class. Ryan Bigg discusses this in his screencast on engines ( @samnang posted this somewhere - ill link it later ).

anyway i thought id take a quick detour just for the purposes of understanding engines and look for a smaller engine, something smaller and easier on the eyes. Well Ryan Biggs mentioned his small forem plugin and it's nice and compact.

You can check it out here https://github.com/radar/forem

[agis]

Yeah I was thinking the same. I tried to start code reading but didn't know where to start and the files were so many.. I'll look into forem.

[kathgironpe]

Activeadmin is well-written and well-tested but too complex start with if we want to understand creating a rails engine. I have a need to create a Rails engine for features to be reused for some Rails apps. I read http://edgeapi.rubyonrails.org/classes/Rails/Engine.html Informative & could get work done sensibly. But will check out forem and others before I go through it.

[adamakhtar]

@bridgeutopia forem is a great project to read then. Its pretty small and the code is self explanatory. There are one or two things I didnt understand but i scanned the 300 issues in its tracker and just by reading the most discussed issues I was able to figure a lot out.

Check it out.

[kathgironpe]

@RoboDisco Thanks. I'll go through it. I started reviewing https://github.com/evrone/inboxes because it is close to what I need but not quite. It's very easy to understand. And I already created a gem with generators before. This is not really about reinventing the wheel but making something that's a lot shinier and fit for different kinds of projects.

[adamakhtar]

I have also just found this write up by ryan biggs author of forem on how to setup an engine to use rspec (by default its test unit) and uses forem as the example.

http://reinteractive.net/posts/2-start-your-engines

[agis]

If you guys think it's a good idea I could talk to Ryan Bigg for joining the discussion.