plasticrain.com

Well here we go again, another week, another site launch – this time we’re launching Railsify, a Ruby on Rails plugin directory. I started work on Saturday morning and deployed at lunchtime on Monday – talk about a quick turnaround. During this time, I designed the site, planned my implementation and actually built the site using Rails.

Railsify is an attempt to create a centralized directory of Ruby on Rails plugins, making it easier to find for new users as well as more experienced ones. It’s our/my way of giving something back to the Rails community.

Users can add their own plugins and they can also add plugins that belong to other developers. Registered users can also bookmark their favourite plugins and become fans of other users (for example, if a member has provided some cool plugins, you may wish to recommend their work to others). Anybody can register whether you’re plugin developer or just a Rails user – and, obviously, it’s all free!

Plugins are sorted into various categories (final list still to be decided) and plugins can belong to up to 3 categories at a time. All plugins have an easy to copy Rails install command so you can easily copy and paste it directly into your shell to install the plugin. A plugin can also build up comments from any registered users.

There are still a few things which we need to iron out should (hopefully) the site get busy such as implementing some sort of plugin quality checking and a way to rate plugins so more popular ones are shown higher on lists.

Railsify will also download any README and CHANGELOG files from your subversion repository and include them as part of your listing. Alternatively, you can write your own readme and change log independent of your SVN repo.

There are also some other cool features but you need to discover them for yourself. So, pop over to railisfy.com and take a look for yourself.