Chapter 10: Rails Plugins
While this book is unable to cover all of the built-in functionality that ships with Rails—and there's plenty of functionality for you to discover and experiment with once you're beyond the last chapter—the plugins architecture of Rails warrants our attention.
What is a plugin?
A plugin is a component that you can add to your application to extend its functionality. While you can certainly write your own plugins, we'll limit our discussion here to using existing plugins. Plugins have been developed for various parts of the Rails framework, adding functionality such as:
- extensions to ActiveRecord functionality
- helper methods
- new template engines (for coding a view using an alternate templating language)
The number ...
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