snippet.rb

For some time here at EdgeCase we've had a bit of a standard for organization of model files in a Rails app. In the body of our model classes, we try to keep things in the following order:

   1. Module includes
   2. Class level constants
   3. acts_as_whatever calls or similar extending method calls, for example attachment_fu's has_attachment
   4. Associations, ex: has_many and belongs_to
   5. Callbacks*
   6. Validations
   7. Named scopes
   8. Class methods
   9. Instance methods
  10. Protected and private methods

I should also note that we are moving away from this style of class method definition:

class << self
  def some_method
    puts "banana"
  end
end

In favor of:

def self.some_method
  puts "banana"
end

We find that having a known file layout makes it easier for the other guys to find the line they are looking for when I break the build.

* All callbacks should go before validations. See this to find out why I say so.