calendar_date_select

It's tried and true, light and airy, funky and fresh, and somewhat poorly documented. This may be a consequence of my n00bie-ness, or that my history is with the admirably-documented FreeBSD and Perl worlds. I'll chalk it up to noobage, though, since many many people seem to be happy with this state of affairs.

The "calendar_date_select" plugin is a nice little widget for generating dates and times for your forms. It pretty much drops in and spits whatever date and time you click on back at your server. I've used it plenty, I've been happy with it, and I think it looks decent out of the box. The problem, so to speak, is illustrated best by the project's own author.

Rather than, you know, actually write docs, the author drops the ball until some clown makes an entire app that does...something. I don't know, because perhaps unlike a lot of people I read faster than I can download and run something like this. I mean, it may indeed be the best form of documentation ever conceived, but I'm skeptical. What happened to just describing the plugin's behavior? It seems like so many Ruby on Rails people are starving for some kind of validation, recognition...something. Crappy screencasts ("...uh...function goes here, and...uhm...tap tap tap...see?") vie for SEO manhood, and everybody and their baby brother takes it upon themselves to package link un-underliners as plugins that are AWSUM and A TOTAL TIMESAVER. Really guys, just drum up some freelance gigs already. Not everyone gets to be Ryan Bates (who, contrary to your apparent perception, obviously edits and, yes, "produces" his 'casts). Posting your demo app on github might let you loosen your ethics enough to call yourself a Rails "contributor," but anybody with a clue should know better.

But I digress. An additional downside of the attitude that a name has to be associated with every bit of help offered is that there is a proliferation of "demo apps" that are supposed to substitute for documentation. At the above URL you will read the words, "The DEMO is the largest source for documentation." Hilarious, right? WTF kind of info-balkanization are we heading toward? Is Rails 2.3 going to do this for itself? "Want to know what has changed in 2.3? Install and run this thingy here!" That the given docs on that page look like something scrawled out somewhere back around v0.0.0.1 only adds to the insult. Couldn't be bothered!

No, I just want to see a file called CHANGELOG.

FYI, if you're looking for bits and bobs and details on CDS, there is a page that has helped me. Some comments indicate that this in fact may be the demo app I've been railing against, but who knows. I always find it through some random comment link because every one of the "official" CHECK OUT DA DEMO links on project pages are always dead. Heck, the electronicnicholas link may be dead by the time you find this page, but it's what I have to click and backtrack to find whenever I'm looking for details. Why? Because the plugin's docs suck.