Introducing my 2nd adventure into Rails plugins: ActsAsLocateable!

ActsAsLocateable is an easy way to give any model the ability to be found by location. For instance, say you have a model Store which is associated with a zip code indicating where that Store is located. To find all the stores within a specific radius of another ZipCode, you can do a

Store.find_within_radius(10, 12345)     # Find all stores within 10 miles of zip code 12345

Install ActsAsLocateable in the normal way

script/plugin install http://svn.baconbear.com/rails_plugins/acts_as_locateable/trunk/

Be sure to read the associated README file after the install for details on installation, setup, and usage.

ActsAsLocateable is based heavily on the ZipCodeSearch plugin by Doug Fales and utilizes much of the same code and data. Special thanks to Doug for making his code freely available!

Just checked in a small update to Acts As Flaggable that includes the following

• Incorporates suggestion from bitbutter to allow add_flag to take either a Flag object (as before) or a Hash. If passed a Hash it creates a Flag object from the hash you passed in.
• Added user_has_flagged? instance method to tell you if a user has flagged an object at all or flagged it with a specific flag

Grab it from trunk in the normal way!

Here’s my first stab at a rails plugin, small as it may be.

Acts As Flaggable is a model modifier which allows flags to be associated with records. Authors of community driven sites may find this useful for quickly adding the ability to mark records as “spam” or “inappropriate”. There’s also facilities in place to automatically take a specific action automatically if a record has been flagged a certain way too many times (Think auto-removing posts that have been marked as “spam”).

To install:

script/plugin install http://svn.baconbear.com/rails_plugins/acts_as_flaggable/trunk

To prepare your database, create a migration with the following:

def self.up
   create_table :flags, :force => true do |t|
     t.column :flag, :string, :default => ""
     t.column :comment, :string, :default => ""
     t.column :created_at, :datetime, :null => false
     t.column :flaggable_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
     t.column :flaggable_type, :string, :limit => 15,
       :default => "", :null => false
     t.column :user_id, :integer, :default => 0, :null => false
   end

   add_index :flags, ["user_id"], :name => "fk_flags_user"
 end

 def self.down
   drop_table :flags
 end

To prepare your model:

class Model < ActiveRecord::Base
    acts_as_flaggable

        protected
        # Flagged method is called after every add_flag.  This callback method
        # is totally optional and does not have to be included in the model
        def flagged(flag, flag_count)
            # Add code here to take action when flag reaches a certain flag_count
        end
 end

To use:

p = Post.find(someid)
p.add_flag Flag.new(:flag => :spam, :comment => 'some comment')

If you notice I used add_flag instead of the typical << operator allowed by rails. Currently it’s a requirement that you use add_flag if you need the flagged callback to be called. I’ll probably fix this in a future checkin.

Avid plugin users will recognize a lot of the code and README from the Acts As Commentable plugin. Thanks to the clear and readable manner Acts As Commentable was written in, it was a fairly easy change to morph the commentable plugin into the flaggable plugin I have here. So, special thanks to Juixe for releasing a well written plugin!