Howto: Add my own functionality to a plugin?

rubyonrails-talk
1

The plugin in this case is acts_as_taggable_on_steroid, which has classes Tag, Tagging and TagList, and a module ActiveRecord::Acts::Taggable which adds the acts_as_taggable method to all classes (so that when the call it they have some other modules included at the class and instance level, giving them the acts as taggable methods).

I have some extra methods i want to add to the Tag class and also to to taggable classes. But, i can't work out how to set this up in such a way as my additional Tag methods sit on top of the exisiting Tag methods, for example.

There must be a standard procedure for this situation - can anyone help me out? (i'm guessing the best practise isn't to physically add my own methods into the plugin's classes/modules)

Thanks max

The plugin has this structure for the acts_as_taggable methods -

module ActiveRecord #:nodoc:   module Acts #:nodoc:     module Taggable #:nodoc:       def self.included(base)         base.extend(ClassMethods)       end

      module ClassMethods         def acts_as_taggable           has_many :taggings, :as => :taggable, :dependent => :destroy, :include => :tag           has_many :tags, :through => :taggings

          before_save :save_cached_tag_list

          after_create :save_tags           after_update :save_tags

          include ActiveRecord::Acts::Taggable::InstanceMethods           extend ActiveRecord::Acts::Taggable::SingletonMethods

          alias_method_chain :reload, :tag_list         end

        ...       end

      module SingletonMethods         ...       end

      module InstanceMethods         ...       end     end   end end

ActiveRecord::Base.send(:include, ActiveRecord::Acts::Taggable)