Some prerequisites:
I use Rails 2.3.4 at the time this is posted and my gem list shows:

actionmailer (2.3.4)
actionpack (2.3.4)
activerecord (2.3.4)
activeresource (2.3.4)
activesupport (2.3.4)
flickraw (0.7.1)
json (1.1.9)
locale (2.0.4)
locale_rails (2.0.4)
mime-types (1.16)
mysql (2.8.1)
rack (1.0.0)
railroad (0.5.0)
rails (2.3.4)
rake (0.8.7)
thoughtbot-paperclip (2.3.1)

Installation:
To install AS, open a shell and type:
ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/activescaffold/active_scaffold.git
Installs AS and all the necessary stuff
ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/rails/in_place_editing.git
Ooops, in place editing was missing – so let’s install it.
ruby script/plugin install --force git://github.com/lackac/render_component.git -r rails-edge'
Ooops again, render_component was taken out of Rails so subforms wouldn’t work – let’s get around this by installing lackac’s plugin (thanks!)

OK, basically, you are set. What now?
The ActiveScaffold website (www.activescaffold.com) and especially their API docs are your bible. So read them, re-read them and re-re-read them while building stuff with AS – you will need the (rudimentary) tipps included there.
Ok, now let’s start with integrating AS into our app. Let’s say you have a basic application which already has a master layout. Put this tag into the of your layout:

<%= active_scaffold_includes %>

It includes all the magic needed for AS. To continue, you should have a resource we can work on, in this case I created a resource named “customer” to store some customer info in it and work on it with AS:

ruby script/generate resource customer name:string phone:string email:string description:string is_active:boolean

Migrate the data now:

rake db:migrate

Edit your customers_controller.rb in app/controllers and put

active_scaffold :customer do |config|
end

right after

class CustomerController < ApplicationController

to make AS aware that it should take care of our customers. Now open config/routes.rb and add :active_scaffold => true right after the customer resource. When you start your server and call /customers, you now should see AS in action. Congratulations, this was the first part

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Good news is, you just need to install it, call rake fckeditor:install and do some simple steps to get it running:

1.) Add a form field override to your model (let’s say our model’s name is news and we want to equip the newstext field with an editor):

def newstext_form_column(record, input_name)
  fckeditor_textarea( :record, :newstext, :name=> input_name, :width => FCKWIDTH, :height => FCKHEIGHT, :toolbarSet => FCKTOOLBAR )
end

def newstext_column(record)
  sanitize(record.newstext)
end

Notice that I added the constants FCKWITH, FCKHEIGHT and FCKTOOLBAR to my config/environment.rb to make sure we can easily edit the attributes of our editor and switch toolbars without editing 1.000 files

2.) Copy over _create_form.html.erb and _update_form.html.erb to your app/views/posts/

3.) edit them by adding the following instead of the submit button tag (bottom of the file):

<input type="submit" value="Create" class="submit" onClick="var oEditor = FCKeditorAPI.GetInstance('record_<%=@record.id%>_<%='newstext'%>_editor'); document.getElementById('record_<%=@record.id%>_<%='newstext'%>_editor').value = oEditor.GetXHTML();" />

Now just replace Create with Update in the _update_form.html.erb and restart your server – here we go

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Here is a quick mashup of useful plugins you might want to check out for your Rails development:

Paperclip:
A very streamlined and easy to use file upload – there is also a bridge plugin that makes it work out nicely with ActiveScaffold. Get it here !

Gramos’ Easy FCKEditor:
Since tiny_mce is one hell of an editor for your web projects but does not work with ActiveScaffold, I have decided to switch back over to FCK for those AS-FCK-EasyUpload needs. Get it here !

Render Component fix for ActiveScaffold:
You may have noticed that the good guys over at the Rails core team have decided to kill render_component, which is especially nasty when it comes to using ActiveScaffold and has_and_belongs_to_many relations with subforms (guess what? they won’t work ^^). The solution is installing the render_component fix via:

ruby script/plugin install --force git://github.com/lackac/render_component.git -r rails-edge

FlickRaw:
Allows for accessing flickr data from your account via the flickr apis. I have tried quite some other plugins put flickraw is the most intuitive (and… well… it works). You can find a HOWTO and info here .

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