I started writing this week’s update about 10,000ft (3,000m) above the 6,117-acre (24.75 km2) area where I’ll mostly be shooting this video course. This week’s focus was on content, a little bit of housekeeping with some GitHub repos I plan to unpack in the course, and a toy project I’ve been playing around with called “PhlexML”.
Course content updates
Thanks to all the feedback from last week’s update, I made a few changes to the course content.
HTML section rolled into Component fundamentals
I had an entire section dedicated to how Phlex maps to HTML, but it wasn’t feeling meaty enough so I combined it into one video and moved it to tags, attributes, & text in Component fundamentals.
More sophisticated forms
A pre-order customer agreed that forms are important so they requested some more sophisticated examples. I have a few ideas of what that means, like bulk form actions, but I will be iterating on this a bit more as the lesson evolves and requesting feedback. If you have concrete ideas of what you’d like to see here, reach out!
Hotwire
I have a weird relationship with Hotwire. I love Turbo Drive & Pagemorphs, but I’m not so keen on Turbo Frames & Stimulus controllers. You’ll see me making a very strong case for Drive & Pagemorphs in the course while trying to steer you away from Turbo Frames. Don’t worry, I’ll cover Frames because I know Phlex does improve it. Stimulus controllers too, but as of the time of this writing, it feels very verbose working with Stimulus controllers and Phlex components.
Sadly I left this draft on my hiking laptop and forgot to push it, so I’ll commit it when I’m back on the west coast. Most of my time this week will be spent thinking about more sane conventions that map between Stimulus controllers and Phlex components.
I’d say I’m 75% “done” with the rough drafts. If you browse through them they’re still a bit scattered and a few sections still need to be completed, but you can see where things are heading directionally with the exception of the Hotwire section.
Superform and other Super repos moved to Beautiful Ruby
I moved Superform, Superview, Superlink, and Supermail repos to the Beautiful Ruby GitHub organization.
These “super” repos are all libraries I’ve been building as I use Phlex. Superform is the furthest along, which I plan on covering extensively in the forms.
The Phlex on Rails course funds open-source software
As I write the drafts for these video units, I’m running into code in the “Super” gems that are awkward to explain or haven’t kept up with Phlex 2.0. To make things less awkward for all of us, I’m going to update a few of these libraries to be better for everybody.
That means if you purchase this course, you’re supporting open-source software. Thanks!
Build content pages in Phlex with PhlexML
I don’t plan on integrating this into the course because it’s not done yet, and I’m not even sure if it’s a good idea, but I shared a code snippet that I call PhlexML. PhlexML is a Rails template handler I’ve been experimenting with that lets me build out content pages for Rails apps and Sitepress sites. I think it will end up being a great addition to Rails, but I’m trying to figure out how to use it as the basis for page models in Sitepress.
Holiday week
This week is the 4th of July, a holiday in the United States that involves parades, fireworks, very hot & humid weather, swimming pools, kids, and popsicles. I’ll be spending it this year with my family in Indiana, so don’t expect much for next week’s update other than more content being updated.