Plugins and themes for WordPress and Ruby on Rails

Plugins and themes – what are they?

One of the reasons for the popularity of platforms like WordPress and Ruby on Rails is that, in addition to the functions they provide, there are thousands of extensions available for free or at a very reasonable cost. In the world of WordPress, these extensions are referred to as either Themes or Plugins. Where the Themes offer new ways to present the content of a site (think page layout), the Plugins add new functions to those provided by WordPress. Certain themes are built to present the functions offered by specific plugins. One such example is the Storefront theme, which provides a very good and intuitive presentation of an online shop built with the WooCommerce shop plugin.

About WordPress

WordPress provides a fully functional Web site out of the box. As soon as it is installed you will have a (very) basic site running, where it is quite straight-forward to add new pages with text and images. All sites built with WordPress operate basically in the same way, which means that it is both possible and useful to offer new themes that can be easily switched on and off to change the presentation of the content.

About Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails is a bit different. It is a framework to be used by programmers to construct Web sites in all kinds of shapes and styles. While WordPress is mainly about managing and presenting content in the form of text, images, video and sound, Ruby on Rails can process all kinds of data and is particularly suitable to handle relationships between different data elements. If you want to build a Web-based tool to handle a warehouse, you would need to keep track of products, logistic chains, deliveries, dates,  personnel and how all these relate to each other.

The same way that WordPress can be extended with plugins, Ruby on Rails is extended with Gems. But since two Web applications built with Ruby on Rails often have quite little in common, it makes less sence to provide something similar to a theme in WordPress.

Made by Tekomatik

Over the years we have created a large number of Plugins, Themes and Gems. Some of them are specific to a particular client project we have worked on, but many have been used across different projects. A few are available in the public domain. Some examples:

•  Manage events and offer tickets for sale via the WooCommerce plugin. WordPress plugin available in the public domain on wordpress.org (see Hello Event)
• Manage events with invitations and RSVP. (Ruby on Rails gem)
• Web interface to translators of multiligual applications, Ruby on Rails gem availabe in the public domain on GitHub (Interpretatio)
• Automatic control of the presentation of pages with text and images (WordPress plugin)
• Smooth integration of maps (Google and OpenStreet Map) and calendars on pages (WordPress plugins)
• Pretty-print of content to PDF files (WordPress plugin)
• Management of quotations and invoices (WordPress plugin)
• Manage person and team information in large clubs and associations (Ruby on Rails gem)
• Management of buy-and-sell ads (WordPress plugin)
• Management of team reporting (WordPress plugin)
• Management of members and periodic subscriptions (WordPress plugin)

In addition, we have contributed to numerous extensions in the public domain.