Partials Naming Conventions and Best Practices

Here is a list of some suggested best practices for partials.

http://www.killswitchcollective.com/articles/13_best_practices_for_rails_partials

Here is an extended quote from that article:

Organization and naming conventions are two initial hurdles in developing effective partials. It is an easy mistake to start arbitrarily organizing and naming partial files without thinking through their roles within the application.

I think that one pitfall is using (or at least over-using) a /views/shared directory for storing partials that will be used by many controllers. I used to use the /shared folder after seeing it used in the prominent Rails books and tutorials, and initially the logic of such a directory makes sense (especially before REST became the norm). That logic breaks down, however, when virtually ALL of your partials exist in that folder! If partials are meant to be reusable and flexible, shouldn't they all be in the shared folder? This is what would happen to me, and suddenly my file names lost a lot of meaning. What does the partial shared/thumbnail show? What about shared/favorite?

Certainly you can simply use more concise naming (user_thumbnail, favorite_video) but I have found that it's best to place these partials in the view folder of the related resource. There's nothing magical about the /shared directory, it's just as easy to use :partial => 'users/thumbnail' as it is to use :partial => 'shared/user_thumbnail'. I find storing the partial in /views/users, /views/videos, etc. helps to clarify the partial's function and keeps my files in order.

Another good practice is utilizing singular and plural naming conventions. In a recent project I was using two partials with poor names: shared/user_block and shared/user_thumb. The user_block partial accepted an array of Users as the :object and passed it on as :collection to the user_thumb partial, placing it all in a wrapper. I found that a name like user_block doesn't help me remember what the partial does - does it display a block of users, or one user in a block? By renaming my partials as users/thumbs and user/thumb, respectively, I was able to clarify their purposes and make it obvious which would display a single thumb versus a collection of them.

One other pitfall is mixing up where wrapper HTML is stored. A sidebar, for example, may have a series of modules that all use a common wrapper and header markup. Some of these modules are stored in their own partials, so should the wrapper markup go inside the partial? Or should that markup stay in the view file and wrap the render method call? Either might be appropriate given any set of circumstances, but the most important thing to remember is to keep it consistent! Placing the wrapper in one partial but leaving it out of another can only lead to confusion down the road.