[LRUG] plugin ideas for Rails - suggestions wanted!

[Alan Kennedy]

Thanks for all the ideas everybody. I received one involving 
microformats that sounds very good, but if any of you have any others, 
please let me know!

To Tom:

I've been told that it is unusual to write a plugin directly, without 
exctracting it from an application. The reason for this, is that I need 
a topic to formalise my project and I've been told that a plugin for 
Rails would be better than an application as a project. I think that if 
I had written a few Rails applications already I could probably use this 
approach and extract a plugin, but having just learned Ruby on Rails 
this summer I don't know what could make a good one from my experience. 
I thought that by asking experienced users I can end up with something 
useful for many people.

However, I could end up using this approach to do the project - first 
writing an application and then extracting the plugin - but I need to 
say what I am going to be doing in advance.

Thanks again everyone for the help,

Alan