Hi,
I'm looking to do something though I'm not quite sure how to phrase it. What I'm looking to do is, essentially, make custom hooks using plugins/engines/gems.
My use case is a member dashboard:
I have a view partial for my site and a number of gems that I wrote installed. Each gem correlates to something a member can manage, like a photo gallery, their profile, their friends, etc.
Now, I know I could open up my view partial and code links to each one of these things, eg:
<a href="/members/manage/photos">Manage Photos</a>
But, I was hoping for something slightly more modular, and was hoping I could figure out some way to hook these links in dynamically when I install my gem and or run my generators.
In other CMS' I have used, this was possible. Wordpress for example had a hook, and Magento had an XML based admin navigation when the links to manage your account were dynamically populated.
What would be a way to go about this in Rails? I've thought of making a db table and writing to it with seeds when I run each gem's generators. But I was hoping something simpler. Is there some way I could essentially get a collection from my gems' lib files?