If you have worked with Ruby on Rails for any time at all, you are very comfortable with the speed at which you can create an application or prototype. Using scaffold generators and by following the conventions of rails, you can easily get started on a prototype app in a few minutes.  As you start to incorporate your client’s styling, menus or other markup/design aspects the power of generators and scaffolds seems to diminished.  If you find yourself in a position of creating the same menu or stylistic elements over and over for multiple sites, you should consider packaging them generically as a generator gem.

In some recent projects, we were creating sites with a consistent  ‘intranet’ look and feel (mandated by the client’s web guidelines).  Doing this each time was a pain because of the need to rework the style sheets, layouts and copy in css images. Lots of  moving parts and hard for the some of the less experienced team members to get right without lots of help. I kept thinking, it would be great if there was some way to generate the boilerplate web menus for our apps so you can get up and running in minutes.  This is where taking a little time to create a generator and package it as an internal gem that each team member can install and use.

Read the rest of this entry »