The eponymous SimpleSidebar is a quick and dirty way to create sidebars. The system follows the premise that there are many kinds of sidebars, some more like templates, some happy in your layouts, some better as partials or components. Sidebars are, actually, a little of each; a sidebar can be a flat partial of links, an ad, a poll or a dynamic menu. You could use any of these methods, but once you start mixing static/dynamic and crossing MVC, it seems like the component style of rendering becomes dominant. This isn’t the most efficient or easy to manage and SimpleSidebar recognises that.
Sidebars are like layouts and filters: they are managed by the controller, depending on the action and controller being called, and, like layouts, are a class-level declaration. In other words, you declare your sidebars and their conditions in each controller and the sidebars miraculously appear in your view. Like associations in your ActiveRecords, there are sidebars in your ActionControllers.
For more information (including examples), see the README.
Author: Matthew Abonyi
Installation:
ruby script/plugin install http://mabs29.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/plugins/simple_sidebar