Musings of a Trained Monkey

Have you seen the "feedback" from the TextDrive admins on Typo? Wow! That is some harsh "praise".
I remember one memory leak in particular caused some issues that the TextDrive guys helped to get fixed in Rails. I guess that experience has helped to sour them against Typo.

I am continuing to work on the polling stuff for Typo. I've ended up expanding my approach to include a full Admin panel for the Polls. Mostly to allow selection of the "active" sidebar poll and to be able to view historical poll results.
I've run into an issue with the sidebar poll content.rhtml though. I was wanting to have AJAX voting via remote_link_to's, but no public routing is defined for sidebar plugins.
I've looked into how TextFilters are implemented in Typo to better understand how they work despite not having public routing. The TextFilterController defines a public_action method that allows child filters to include symbols for :plugin_public_action which in turn exposes the referenced methods.
Despite being named plugin_public_action it is in fact only implemeted for Filters and not for Sidebar components. I am debating adding this functionality and submitting a patch, however, I wonder if I am the only person that needs this functionality? I would update the routes.rb file to include a route for my poll controller, but that doesn't work because the sidebar controller handles loading all of the dependencies for "child" plugins.

I've been working on a polling plugin for Typo. Initially I've been including it as a sidebar plugin, but now I am not sure if this is the way to distribute it. The code itself doesn't really need to be tied to the sidebar model even though it started out that way.

I am not sure what exactly the best way is to package it though. Rails provides for a component mechanism that may be a more appropriate way to distribute the polling code, but I am uncertain of the specifics of being able to add database tables for components or their lifecycle in general. I need to spend more time researching this.

The sidebar mechanism in Typo makes adding the tables fairly straight forward, but I wonder how things will work down the line for future updates to the plugin. Also I haven't found the hook in the sidebar for when a sidebar block is removed. Seems like I should remove the associated polling tables when someone removes the poll from their sidebar.

Which leads me to another candidate for distribution which would be to make the polling available as an ActiveRecord mixin. Similar to how the Touch mixin in the TimeStamp class works with the created_on and updated_on columns. The Pollable? mixin could require model objects to include a poll_id column or something or perhaps add acts_as_pollable. That way you could associate the poll with individual articles instead of just putting a single poll in the sidebar. I still would need to add the tables used for storing the polling information however. So I am not sure that this is right either.

<plea>Does anyone with Rails knowledge have any guidance for me?</plea>