Redmine

Learn Rails. Really. Explaining such basic things would only repeat what's in the various guides. First stop: the ruby on rails guides http://guides.rubyonrails.org/.

Alright, thank you for that. I didn't know that Redmine folders followed a specific Rails architecture, except for the MVC part which I'm already familiar with. The link you gave me seems really useful, so thank you.

However, based on this architecture, I'd like to raise a problem you guys probably have already faced. As I said above, my job is to adapt Redmine to some specific applications, which means getting rid of some functionnalities. As far as I know, that implies getting into the core right? The thing is I was explicitely told to make this custom Redmine app compatible with future releases (so the tool is not static). How can I do that in term of software architecture ? I assume that installing a new version of Redmine would make a mess in the current installation.

I think the "easiest" would be to just throw a custom View layer over it, maybe with some tweaks to the routes so that certain actions aren't even "browseable". You could do all that in a plugin, i.e. views in your plugin will override core views, and you could "extend" some classes (I'd say controller preferably) to throw in some defaults in a chained call. That on the other hand will also mean your plugin will only be compatible with a specific redmine version because you won't automagically get the view changes merged into your views, but I'd say it shouldn't be too much of a hassle to make it compatible for a whole minor tree.

Yeah that's what I thought. The thing is I just can't forsee what modifications will be brought to new releases, so the best thing to do would be to add a view layer. Alright, thank you for your time Felix. Have a nice day.