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by wotsrovert 5492 days ago
I've done Rails consulting, full-time, for 5 years; I haven't used use scaffolds since probably 2006. Instead, most of my productivity gains have come from learning to use third-party gems, better understanding the framework's ever-evolving capabilities, and Texmate snippets & commands.

However, a site such as this, where popular scaffolds could be voted up to the top of a pile might produce some worthy projects.

I can imagine myself using scaffolding when using a gem for the first time, one of the more involved gems like carrierwave, uploadify, or devise. These gems can take a while to get working - you may be targeting a different version of rails than the blog post you find, or you're deploying to heroku and need some custom tweaks - the details can slow you down and make you reconsider whether to use the gem, especially if you're billing by the hour.

If, on scaffoldhub, I could find a scaffold for something quite specific ('rails 3.1 and compass on heroku' or 'devise, haml, coffeescript, simple_form') that would be really, really helpful.

I'd quickly get something working on my dev machine, which saves me frustration and gives the first charge of coding pleasure, an important component to our work. It would enable me to more liberally experiment with new libraries and coding practices.

Perhaps, also, a rake task to generate a scaffold from a working rails app. That way, a scaffold, once working, can be extended. For example, first I install the uploadify scaffold, verify that it's working both locally and in production, then I add compass and devise. I run rake scaffoldhub:snapshot rails_3.0_uploadify_compass_devise_heroku, then scaffoldhub:publish to upload my work.

I hope you continue with the project.

1 comments

Wow... fascinating idea about "rake scaffoldhub:snapshot"!

I really appreciate your feedback and encouragement. I definitely will continue working on scaffoldhub; probably my next step will be to open source the web site code (gem is already open) so others can help out on this. I really see this as a community resource - not a private project.