Migrating Plugins and Gems to Rails 3

Rails 3 is full of great new features for plugin authors: a stable API, more modularity, and the ability to hook into its generators. To add these features, though, Rails had to change a lot, breaking compatibility with many current plugins. We’re going to walk together on what the major changes are and migrate some favorite plugins to be work well with and take advantage of Rails 3.

Specifically, we’re going to cover:

• How the new generators work and how to migrate old generators to work with them.
• How to take advantage of ActiveModel’s standard API.
• How the new Railties system works.
• Cleaning up any output from plugins that runs afoul of the default escaping in Rails 3’s views.

I’m going to use a popular plugin that doesn’t work with Rails 3 – the specific one hasn’t been decided yet, but Formtastic and Shoulda are high on the list – and migrate it, using the source code from it as example code throughout the presentation.