Building a New Site With Rails Part 1
You may have noticed that my ‘blog 6 days a week’ has lately been kinda lax lately, but I finally, finally, started work on Ruby-idioms.com. Nothing out there public yet, but I’ve finally found the time and energy, and quite frankly, got through that old friend of mine, fear of getting stuff done instead of watching TV and reading RSS feeds, and actually got some code down on… uhm… an editor.
I figure that it’d be a good idea to start blogging the experience of building a site from scratch with Rails by a newbie (not that there aren’t a hundred of those already). Read My Code was done in 24 hours, I figure a week or so, or heck, a day or two per feature, ought to be enough.
I started by breaking things into some steps:
- Create the Idiom scaffold, model validation, etc
- User authentication and login
- User integration (edit your own Idioms)
- Site layout, look and feel
- Commenting
- Tagging
- More site layout stuff (I’m thinking this might be the hardest part for me, as I am a programmer and not a designer for a very good reason
That’s of course a bit over simplified, and I’m probably missing out something huge, but that’s the current attack plan. All things are flexible of course. My grand plan is to code one day, blog the results and anything interesting or challenging that I find. I’ll make sure I push things up to the GitHub project page as well.
No related posts.
June 9th, 2010 at 7:55 am
OK, you’ve at least got 1 follower for this thing. I’ll be glad to have a project to review that uses authentication. I’m still a newbie myself, so I’m hoping to learn a few thing from it. Looks like the code posted on GitHub so far it pretty slim. I’ll check back in a few days.
June 9th, 2010 at 8:22 am
Hey Matt. You may want to check out a few of my earlier posts with some actual code and links for some super-simple but completely working authentication. http://thinkinginrails.com/2010/03/rails-authentication-in-a-gist/
June 9th, 2010 at 11:43 am
That’s cool stuff on that roll-your-own authentication… I think I can sww what all is going on. I’ve seen a webcast on authenitcation at railscasts.com, and know it requires a gem or something to make it work. I’ll have to compare the two and see what I can learn.
June 9th, 2010 at 11:57 am
I think I have the source of where I started in the post, no gems required, but more work. But on the other hand, you do get to see a bit more of what is going on and why. That’s why I chose to do it that way. For ruby-idioms though I’m thinking of going with Devise or one of the other popular gems for authentication simply to speed up the development time (and let other people do the boring stuff
June 16th, 2010 at 3:22 am
Well, now I can report that I have sucessfully installed and used the Devise authentication gem in my little test app that I am using to learn Rails. I am such a newbie at all this stuff, so anything that I can install and hack my way through configuring and actually see the thing always brings a smile to my face. The Ryan Bates RailsCasts.com videos help me a lot by showing how simple it is to set it up and do some customization.
I like all the support it gives you, especially the built-in functions to handle e-mailing the password to user, and letting them change their password while logged in.
At this point, I must say am going with the Devise gem. Very nice, and I need to move on to learning other things about Rails/Ruby.
June 16th, 2010 at 8:48 am
I turned my last comment into a blog post over on my blog (with a little more info), and I pointed back to you site and this post as one of the stepping stones in my Rails authentication journey.
http://therealmattslay.blogspot.com/2010/06/devise-authentication-for-rails.html
June 16th, 2010 at 9:26 am
Hey Matt, great post and glad to help. Looking forward to seeing how your stuff goes!