Schadenfreude

So, I figured I might as well provide a quick tutorial on how to make Mephisto Plugins currently. Many of the old plugins are broken, so there needs to be a resurgence of plugin development. Here’s the basic structure of the Tag Cloud plugin:

mephisto_tag_cloud
 - init.rb README
 - lib
   - mephisto_plugins
     - tag_cloud.rb

As you can see, the structure is very simple. Here’s my code for init.rb

Liquid::Template.register_filter(MephistoPlugins::TagCloud)

That’s it! No require or anything! Next, I edited lib/mephisto_plugins/tag_cloud.rb:

module MephistoPlugins
  module TagCloud
    def size_tag(tag, largest = 2)
      size = (Tag.find_by_name(tag).taggings(true).length + 18).to_f / 18
      size = largest if size > largest
      "<span style='font-size: #{size}em'><a href='/tags/#{tag}'>#{tag}</a></span>"
    end
  end
end

Holy crap that barely any code at all! So, the moral of the story is that it’s very easy to make the plugins once you figure out what to do.

howto, mephisto, plugins, rails, ruby, tutorial