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You’ve built KanbanFlow

Across eleven modules you’ve built a complete, production-capable Rails application using Phlex as the view layer throughout. Take a moment to look at what exists:

The app

  • Multi-user Kanban boards with columns and cards
  • Drag and drop reordering within and between columns
  • Inline add and edit for cards and columns — no page navigations
  • Real-time updates via Turbo broadcasts — changes appear instantly for all connected users
  • Presence — see who else is viewing the board right now
  • Role-based access — owners control board structure, members work the cards
  • Full authentication — sign up, sign in, sign out, password reset

The component library Phlex::UI has grown into a genuine design system — Button, Card, Badge, Avatar, Alert, Toast, Modal, Dropdown, Accordion, Tabs, Icon, Breadcrumb, Table, EmptyState, Heading, Link, all form primitives, and the KanbanFlow-specific components built on top of them.

What you’ve learned

  • Phlex v2 component architecture — props, slots, vanish, capture, kit syntax
  • The Stimulus + Phlex pattern — components own their data-* wiring
  • Turbo 8’s morph-first mental model — when to reach for Frames and Streams, and when not to
  • ActionCable for both broadcast refreshes and presence channels
  • Rails 8 authentication — the generator, sessions, password reset
  • Plain Ruby policy objects for authorisation without Pundit
  • Tailwind v4 semantic theming across three colour schemes with dark mode

Where to go from here

Bonus A — Extracting Phlex::UI as a gem The Phlex::UI components we’ve built throughout this series are designed to be portable. Bonus A walks through extracting them into a standalone Ruby gem — gemspec, versioning, test isolation, and publishing to RubyGems.

Bonus B — Performance and advanced real-time Fragment caching, N+1 query elimination, more granular broadcasts at the column level, and presence at scale. The performance decisions we deferred throughout the series, addressed properly.

Companion — Rails 8 Authentication deep dive The full authentication story — invitation emails with signed tokens, email verification, account locking, OmniAuth, and the BoardPolicy expanded to handle complex multi-tenant access scenarios.

Companion — Richer cards Labels, due dates, assignees, checklists, file attachments, and a card detail modal. Everything needed to make KanbanFlow genuinely useful for a real team.

Thank you for following along. If this series helped you — file issues, open PRs, share it with other Rails developers who’ve bounced off Phlex. The best way to make Phlex more approachable is to show what’s possible with it.

Lesson 5 - Presence