Typo Sidebar’s are now controller free!

Which probably means nothing to the vast majority of people reading this. But it makes me very happy.

Until a couple of revisions ago, Typo sidebars were rendered through a convoluted route, which involved n + 1 calls to render_component, where n is the number of items on the sidebar. Calling render_component isn’t something you really want to do even once if you can help it. It’s not as slow as it used to be, but it’s still unpleasant.

So, now a typo sidebar looks pretty much like any other Rails plugin. It lives in vendor/plugins with a model, a view, a test and an only mildly clever init.rb.

For the MVC purists among you, there’s a small amount of shenanigans involved because the model carries information about where to find the sidebar’s template, but I shall plead necessity and have done with it. Besides, the model never makes direct use of the information, it just holds onto it for the controller.

The upshot of this, and Scott’s changes is that Typo’s components directory is now empty. And you can call me Mr Happy!

You don’t have to call me Mr Happy of course, but I reserve the right to be happy anyway.

Expect a quick introduction to writing your own sidebars soon.