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  • “Paginatin' Christmas”
    – Chris on December 25, 2007

    In a timely holiday manner, we present to you a short list of will_paginate resources. Please enjoy responsibly.

    will paginate

    Sightings

    Since its inception, millions of people have paginated billions of records using will_paginate. A few notable examples:

    • Err Free’s FamSpam
    • MTV’s Real World Casting
    • Beast
    • Warehouse
    • DeMontrond RV (with ajax!)
    • Grabb.it

    Know a site that belongs on this list? Let us know in the comments.

    New Features

    Just in time for the holidays, Mislav has gifted us all with a bucket o’ new features for will_paginate, mostly dealing with customizing the output. Take a look at his announcement and dive in.

    Testing Your Views

    For those of us constantly asking the view testing question, stern but fair will_paginate maintainer Mislav comes to the rescue with his aptly titled will_paginate and view testing article. It’s in-depth, so be sure to check it out. Also: subscribe to his blog. Immediately.

    Ajax Pagination

    This Ajax thing is going to be huge! Get in on the action with Matt Aimonetti’s Ajax Pagination in less than 5 minutes article. He’ll teach you how to unobtrusively add Ajax behavior to will_paginate using Prototype, LowPro, and RJS.

    If you’re more of the jQuery type, check out the Ajax will_paginate, jq-style article over at ozmm.

    The RailsCast

    The prolific Ryan Bates has a screencast explaining the basics of WP. As always, it’s to the point and very well done. And hey, you can even watch it on your iPod! Have a look.

    will_paginate without ActiveRecord

    There’s only a few things I like more than websites with tildes in the URL. Like, say, twisting Rails plugins into non-Rails uses. Lucky for us, Erin Ptacek provides both in an entry titled Erin’s Adventures with Rails: will_paginate without ActiveRecord. In it, you’ll learn how to paginate a collection of OpenStruct objects. No ActiveRecord required. What a rush.

    Ferret Integration

    Brandon Keepers, that handsome devil, wrote a popular article detailing the steps necessary to paginate your Ferret search results using good ol’ WP. If you’re using Ferret, this is definitely the way to go.

    Solr Integration

    While I don’t know what ‘The Pug Automatic’ means, and I certainly know nothing of the RoboPug in said blog’s header, Henrik Nyh’s article on paginating acts_as_solr with will_paginate is an undeniable must read for any Java lovin’, Apache huggin’ Solr user wanting to add a bit of style and flair into his app.

    acts_as_taggable Integration

    Perhaps as contentious as the comments and this thread suggest, Jim Morris’ Paginating acts_as_taggable article offers a few ways to make both the on_steroids variant of acts_as_taggable plugin and will_paginate play nicely together.

    Rails Plugins

    A number of Rails plugins have been released with support for will_paginate lovingly baked in. Like a Santa shaped sugar cookie.

    SpinBits’ SimplySearchable helps you search in style while providing options to paginate using our friend WP.

    UltraSphinx, Evan Weaver’s preeminent Sphinx search engine plugin, longs to be installed alongside will_paginate.

    While will_paginate, due to popular demand, plays nicely with scope_out, Nick Kallen’s similar HasFinder works technically and conceptually well with everyone’s favorite paginator.

    And finally, how can we neglect to mention Will_Paginate_Search, which hooks into both WP and acts_as_indexed to the benefit of all involved parties.

    The Bugtracker

    Found a bug? Got an idea? Of course we’d love to hear it. Our Lighthouse tracker, which we love is the place for all of it.

    The Google Group

    Did you catch it above? Yep, you did. So observant: there’s now a Google Group for will_paginate. Be sure to join up and chime in.

    Nightly RDoc

    Finally, RDoc is now generated nightly from the latest code in Subversion. Check it out at the Rock. It’s like Christmas every day!

    That’s a wrap

    Hey, where did 2007 go? I’m getting sucked into 2008 faster than Perl into obscurity.

    Keep paginatin’, Railers. See you next year.

  • Ben Reubenstein, 29 minutes later:

    A Christmas gift indeed! Thx! Can’t wait to implement.

  • Robby Russell, 34 minutes later:

    We’re using will_paginate on most of our client projects. One public-facing example is here.

  • justin, about 2 hours later:

    We use will_paginate at Spiceworks as well as a handful of other small projects I’ve done (VW R32 registry is the only public one), I love it.

    At Spiceworks we took will_paginate a few months ago and merged it into another (custom) plugin to perform optional Ajax paging and also auto-append pages as you scroll through a fixed-height table (gets rid of the need for a typical paging control).

  • rick, about 3 hours later:

    Hey, lighthouse uses will paginate too! I’m probably going to bake it into my logged_exception plugin at some point too.

  • toby sterrett, about 3 hours later:

    heck yeah, will_paginate rules. It’s in use on stafftool and in lots of our projects at powerset, notably powerlabs – thanks for the kickass plugin guys!

  • shanti braford, about 4 hours later:

    I’m using will_paginate in all my Rails apps that require pagination. (just about all of em)

    Including: UmmYeah , Incredimazing and DealBonzai

  • Zack, about 5 hours later:

    Yes – I’ve been using it all over the place in client’s apps and even in my own: ServiceSidekick

    Really good work guys!

    Catch you in 2008.

  • Daniel, about 6 hours later:

    We are using a little altered version of will_paginate for PepBank basically we store the retrieved ids with a key in memcache so we don’t have to repeat the database search for every page.

    Good work. Thanks

  • Josh Owens, about 8 hours later:

    Chris,

    Thanks for mentioning the Demontrond RV website, it was one of the first real rails projects I ever released.

    I have another site, Tasty Planner, that won the Rails Rumble in 2007. We used ferret + will_paginate in the first edition of the app for the competition. We now use will_paginate and ultrasphinx. You can see it in both the recipes and chefs section.

  • , about 15 hours later:

    Been using will_paginate for Autopendium:”http://autopendium.com” since the first version, and have never looked back. Thanks, Chris T

  • grant, about 23 hours later:

    Jobster switched to will_paginate mid-December. Works beautifully! Thanks!

  • Fjan, about 23 hours later:

    SuperSaaS uses will_paginate extensively, albeit with a few small modifications to make it work on Ajax enabled pages

  • Thomas, 1 day later:

    We’ve used it on many sites such as http://mobileact.co.uk, http://islandoo.com

  • Keeran, 1 day later:

    Hey Merry Christmas guys – many thanks for all the posts, it’s been a great year!

    We’ve been using wp for recent projects and it rocks, noteably the WP+AAF combo, which we’re using on Wales Cymru

    I hope you have a great new year,

    kee

  • Pat, 2 days later:

    Another Sphinx plugin that integrates with will_paginate is one of my own creation: Thinking Sphinx

    And I’ve used will_paginate in pretty much every Rails site I’ve built. Thanks for both the plugin and this wonderful blog.

  • Brendan, 3 days later:

    I submitted a bug+patch, and it was (nearly instantly) marked as spam:

    http://err.lighthouseapp.com/projects/466/tickets/172

    So, erm… I’m a real person, and (I think) this is a real bug.

  • Walter Korman, 7 days later:

    Guildomatic uses will_paginate, check out the news and bosses pages.

  • Sven Fuchs, 12 days later:

    There’s also will_paginate_liquidized which let’s you use will_paginate in Liquid templates.

  • Albert, 21 days later:

    Jan. 15, 2008: Can’t install will_paginate.

    Several sites point to errtheblog.com as the source of the will_paginate. This page even says “Grab the plugin here: ./script/plugin install \ svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/will_paginate”

    But I, and other people report, “Connection Refused”. Earliest problem report I’ve seen was dated Dec 06, 2007, over 5 weeks ago.

    This page also says “Inspect the code here: http://require.errtheblog.com/plugins/browser/will_paginate/” but this link results in a 404!

    I’ve seen several others report this problem. But I’ve not found anyone posting a solution.

    I thought for sure that errtheblog.com would have some info about this problem and it’s solution.

    I tried both 1) ruby script/plugin source svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/ 2) ruby script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/

    Any suggestions please?

  • Benni, 22 days later:

    In my website the users are able to select their preferenced per_page-parameter. Default is 20 items per page, but 50 or 100 should also be possible. In classic pagination-style I pass the view_helper a per_page-object. The rendered link should look like this: ../members?page=2,per_page=50

    How can I realize it with will_paginate?

    Thanks in advance.

  • Benni, 26 days later:

    o.k. I got it. just make use of :params => {:per_page => 50} when calling will_paginate.

    thanks for the great plugin.

  • josh, about 1 month later:

    So, when will we see will_paginate/cache_fu integration, where will_paginate calls cache_fu’s get_cache instead of the finder methods? That would be pretty sweet.

  • Andrew Bruce, 2 months later:

    My one gripe with it is the HTML that gets spat out. A list of pages is an ordered list. Why not mark it up as such? It would make styling pagination with CSS much easier. Granted, if you’re not into CSS, this wouldn’t be a good idea :)

  • Ben, 4 months later:

    Both the SVN and HTTP links don’t work. What gives?

  • Sviergn Jiernsen, 4 months later:

    Yippee!!!!! Open source strikes again! First, deprecate a much used feature and cripple it in a 2.0 release, not giving a rat’s ass about people actually using your code who might have something to say to others about it (e.g., “Wow, it’s really cool and easy to use” or alternatively “It f&^ing sucks because developers pull the rug out from under you!”). Then, retrofit the functionality but make it difficult as hell to get. And then, as an example of “sugary” thinking, pull the plug completely and yank availability of the plugin. Rails is dead. This has clinched it. Feel free not to agree, of course, that’s your right. But if this is the future of open source Web frameworks you just handed victory to ASP.NET. And curse you to hell for doing that by not giving a sht!

  • SB, 4 months later:

    Sviergn, I couldn’t agree more. RoR is a dog that I’m constantly having to clean up after. I can’t believe the arrogance of the developers that they would deprecate common functions and not be backwards-compatible by leaving them in. I am currently trying to change hosts with a previously working application, and because the new host uses Rails 2.0 I’m having to rewrite a tonne of code because the methods no longer exist… So much for simplifying development.

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