Josh Huckabee

I just finished a project for a friend using Mephisto. I wrote a custom plugin to handle online submittals of appraisal orders that includes an entire admin interface to manage all the drop down boxes you see. The module stores appraisal submittals so you can see them in the admin interface and re-assign them to different appraisers or update their status etc. The module also autmatically emails a copy of the appraisal to the selected appraiser on submission. Its a very targeted module, so I don't plan to release it, but if anyone is interested in the code, I'd be happy to share it. Just shoot me an email.

Working with the Mephisto plugin system was fun and very easy to do. For anyone looking to extend Mephisto through its plugin system, I highly recommend just grabbing an existing module and dissecting its contents as the documentation isn't quite complete.

The new site is being hosted by HostingRails.com. I've been very impressed with the performance so far, and the little support I've required has been handled very quickly. They get a nods up from me for anyone looking for a shared "Ruby on Rails" hosting provider.

I started playing with the Mephisto contact form plugin written by James Crisp and added a very minor modification to allow users to edit the destination email address from the plugin configuration admin section.

mephisto_contact_form/lib/plugin.rb becomes

module Mephisto
  module Plugins
    class ContactForm < Mephisto::Plugin
      author 'James Crisp'
      version '0.1'
      
      option :destination_email_address, "Enter your address here"
    
      public_controller 'ContactForm', 'ContactForm'
      add_route 'contact_form', 
                    :controller => 'contact_form', 
                    :action => 'contact_form'
      add_route 'contact_submit', 
                    :controller => 'contact_form', 
                    :action => 'contact_submit', 
                    :conditions => { :method => :post }

    end
  end
end

and mephisto_contact_form/lib/contact_notifier.rb becomes

class ContactNotifier < ActionMailer::Base
  include Mephisto::Liquid::UrlMethods
  
  self.template_root = File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/views'
  
  def contact_notification(contact_message)
    recipients      Mephisto::Plugin['ContactForm'].options['destination_email_address']