One killer feature of Ruby on Rails (for me) is script/console. Being able to interact with your code and data inside the full Rails environment is a powerful tool for development. Some days I practically live there, and if I get carried away, I do a lot of my testing there too (bad, I know).

I love Ruby and Rails, but being a contract developer means I go where the money is and recently that has been in WordPress plugin development. I enjoy developing for WordPress, but I’ve been spoiled by Rails and I often long for an interactive console for WordPress.

As a result, I’ve been developing (and using) a Wordpress plugin built for Wordpress developers. It provides an in-browser console where you can “play” with the code you’re working on.

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this screencast will be worth at least a bazillion of ‘em: ~ </embed>

So there you have it. It is currently version 0.1.0 (very young) and I would love some help to make it even more awesome. The source code is hosted on GitHub, so please fork away and I’d be happy to merge in your changes.

Or, simply go download the plugin and try it.

NOTE In developing this plugin, I leaned on a few other open-source projects for inspiration (and in some cases, code). They are:

I thank the authors for opening their source.