Semantosoph

Howto write your own plugin for mephisto

On my crusade on gaining more insight into mephisto, I felt it would be helpful to see how this plugin thingy works. I found, that writing your own mephisto plugin is not as hard as you would think. In fact, it is real easy. Start with generating the plugin skeleton.

# ruby script/generate plugin NameOfYourPlugin

Now, define your method inside lib/name_of_your_plugin.rb.

module NameOfYourPlugin

  def link_to_something_strange(object_to_yield)
    url =  'http://example.com/api?'
    url += "id=#{object_to_yield['some_attribute']}" 
    content_tag :a, 'foobar', :href => url
  end
end

After that, open init.rb and paste in the following:

require 'name_of_your_plugin'
Liquid::Template.register_filter NameOfYourPlugin

The first line is the standard registration you need for every rails plugin. The second line registers whatever method you defined as a global liquid filter. If you like to add another filter, just put the method inside lib/name_of_your_plugin.rb and it will be automagically registered.

The last step is to include your fresh filter into the liquid template.

{{ object_to_yield | link_to_something_strange }}

That’s all folks. Really. Be sure to check the first fruit of this new gained insights.