whether to use refinerycms or not - ruby-on-rails

Me and a bunch of our friends decided to make a website with ruby on rails. Our question is whether refinerycms is fit with out website. What we are building is a place where our community would sign in and post up a bunch of pictures, videos, live streams, or articles/blogs. The front page would be have top feeds and featured articles. That is the idea for the most part. We thought about refinerycms but after looking into refinery it doesn't seem so fit and was wondering if its better if we just start it from scratch.

If you don't know rails and don't want to spend many hours learning.(I love it. It's fun, but not for everyone), go for wordpress.
Wordpress is easier to set up and deploy to a server.
All web hotels usually works with PHP and Mysql out of the box, witch wordpress depends on
Rails depends on ruby and that makes the server configuration more complex.
For a developer Ruby on rails is gold. But, if your main focus is to get a blog up, its to much to learn.
If you want to learn ROR go to railscast and get a pro subscription. It's the best way to pick up rails tricks

If your website mostly functions as a blog, the Refinery would be a great choice, IMHO. On the other hand, expect to do some programming on your own part if you need features such as the ones you mentioned (i.e. Live streams). On the other hand, if you're completely new to Rails, the it might be slightly more challenging, but don't let that stop you. :)

Related

HOW: Static company website with Rails

I have a really stupid question in my mind.
I have used Wordpress to create a website for long time, but I dont want to use it anymore. And now I am looking for little bit different approach. Otherwise, I am quite new in Ruby on Rails. I have read some books and I am not feeling in this matter so confident. So, here is the deal:
My friend asked me to create a simple website for his company. He wants only super simple static website which will contains these pages:
Home
Products
Contact
Each page will contain simple information and there is no need to implement contact forms and other basic functionalities. I also want to deploy this app on Heroku, because he has not a lot of money and we are looking for free hosting. Moreover, I think that the best approach in this matter will be some kind of CMS which will help him to edit the website.
The overview of final solution:
Static webpages with simple CMS
Using twitter bootstrap for basic layout
Deploy on Heroku
I appreciate every contribution in this matter.
Thank you
Everything you have said suggests that you should stick with WordPress. It's perfectly capable of presenting a non-blog static website (use Pages instead of Posts) and there are some excellent themes available. WP has, over the years really become a CMS that's also good for blogging. There are other tools like Drupal that may be appropriate.
I set up a WP site with almost exactly the same goals for some very non-technical people; with a little training they eventually learned how to manage the site, upload images, add content, grant permissions to others, and do a lot of other pretty cool stuff. I have been using Rails since 2007, but for that case, it was not the right solution.
Rails is a very (very!) sophisticated web development environment used to build complex and scalable dynamic websites. With power comes a level of complexity several orders of magnitude higher than WordPress. Even if you use refinerycms you still need to do a lot of complicated setup, and need to know a lot of stuff. Even if you're using Heroku and following a RailsCast like the one for refinerycms, you'll undoubtedly hit some wall where you really need to understand more ... Rails is alluring this way -- seems simple.
If you are using this a reason to learn Rails, and are willing to invest some time, then by all means go for it. But if you want a simple solution, it's not the way. Learning Rails is like learning to fly a plane, but harder.
For static pages with rails, you can use High Voltage gem. You can find the detailed usage of this gem in this blog post . Once you create the pages, then you can easily deploy your app as like normal rails app in the heroku.

How to structure Ruby on Rails website

I'm curious to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I have previous experience with PHP and some basic C/Objective C and Java.
I have done a couple of 'Get started with Rails' tutorials and want to try do create a complete site now. I do have some questions.
Is the entire website an app? I mean, sure, the simple 'blog-with-comments' examples fit in a single app. But what if you want more? Say, a forum, a blog, community, shop, task manager and so on (only random examples here... :) ).
Should I split these things into different 'apps' or not? I would still need them to communicate with each other and share user data and so on...
Any ideas?
Regards
Linus
In general, your core competency as a rails app -- that which you provide the most value for your users. You can then supplement from there, so your support section might be GetSatisfaction and live on support.yourdomain.com.
Your online shop could be a link to your shopify page at shop.yourdomain.com, etc.

Does Ruby on Rails affect how a web page looks?

Most of the time, whenever I hit a website that looks "bubbly" in nature, and all prettified in those pastel-like colors, I think to myself, "This was probably done with Rails." And, lo and behold, after some digging into the site's information pages I discover this is actually true. So, I pose the question, not knowing much about Rails but enough about Django to understand how the database stuff works:
Does RoR have any display-specific qualities that affect how a web page looks? Or do all RoR devs naturally use the same Adobe tools to make everything look so ubiquitous?
Ruby on Rails is a server side technology, so it doesn't lend any specific quality to the user visible design. That said, it is a "trendy" technology so people who are likely to write their back-end code with RoR are likely to choose a particular "Web 2.0" style for their views.
As a Ruby on Rails developer, I can tell you that most Ruby on Rails developers are passionate about their work and we pay a lot of attention to details when building websites as much backend as front end. Its not just a trend, its a way of thinking and working.
No, it hasn't any display-specific qualities.
The theory is that RoR makes that backend stuff easier, so more time can, and apparently is, spent on the front end stuff.
Its all done with Mirrors. And CSS. :)
Rails is a very popular Web framework, it's just be coincidence that all the ones you've looked at have been rails apps.
What kind of sites have you been looking at to draw this hypothesis?
that's a funny question with a funny description :) ... bubbly!
As a madman, I develop with RoR, it's kind of rule in our area. We learn madness from the beginning, as a result of http://railsforzombies.org...
May wise men follow a wise path!
Short Answer: NO
However...
As a Rails developer I can say that due to the Agile nature of Rails and the speed in which you can develop web applications with Rails I do find myself having more time freed up on a project to spend polishing the user interface. I believe this may be a reason you often see more polished looking Rails sites.
So in my mind I believe your choice of framework can have a direct correlation to the end product that is produced!
Rails does add some stuff to the front end. Like to every html form, it will add a hidden input element authenticity_token.
You can also tell because rails URLs and form actions will never end with suffixes like .aspx or .php or .html or .jsp, and they won't usually append ?query=book&encoding=utf8 like you see on google. And they won't usually have superlong crufties like you see on amazon (eg http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby/dp/1934356549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297922135&sr=8-1). Instead Rails prefers simple routing URLs. If amazon were written in rails, you might instead expect amazon.com/books/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby
So there are ways to spot a Rails app. I expect other web frameworks, especially the ones that emulate rails, would duplicate some or all of these features, so this isn't a sure-fire method, but it helps.

Would Ruby on Rails suit my work..?

I wanted to make a web site with the following basic features- (1)User registration for buyers and sellers. (2)profile pages (3)A buyer should be able to post work and should get profile links of the corresponding seller who has expertise in that work.
As time progresses i would want to add more features to the site.The freelancer sites where user can post jobs and get bids is the best example of the work.
(1)I want my code to be maintainable as i woud be adding features later on. (2)It should be quick to develop. (3)Resources should be available(not the entire thing, atleast in bits and pieces) for the above requirements and should not be tough to find for future enhancements. (4)Design should be decoupled from the buisness logic as i would outsource the design work.
I was thinking of Ruby on Rails for this work as i have experience in the MVC model and RoR looks cool.I am from the mobility domain so i don't know whether RoR will suit my work
Would RoR suit this purpose.If yes where can i find the resources to the above mentioned requirements.
Thanks
Ruby on Rails would be ideal for this type of website.
Check out some of these resources for info on how to use Ruby on Rails:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
http://railscasts.com/
http://www.railsforum.com/
I noticed you are already aware of TeachMeToCode, but there is a tag there for all the Rails 3 tutorials, with some blog tutorials and what looks like the beginning of a series on how to build a del.icio.us clone. Since they are in Rails 3, they would be well worth checking out:
http://teachmetocode.com/screencasts/tag/rails-3/
One of the best tutorials:
http://railsforzombies.org
It will let you have your own point of view quickly.
It depends on with which languages you have experience. Any good MVC framework will do the job just fine but if you like Ruby syntax RoR is definitely a good framework to develop this kind of application.

Great ruby on rails examples of almost real world applications

Great ruby on rails examples of almost real world applications:
Can somebody give some links of sites that have such codes using the best practices in structure, implementing it, models, controllers, security, views, caching, modularizing and so on? thanks
You could start with guides.rubyonrails.org. They have a lot of information on there. A very good example to start with. Start with the Getting Started link. There are also a lot of other examples on that site.
The next step you might be better off buying a book on this subject. I purchased Simply Rails 2 by Patrick Lenz. Also a very good starter book with good examples. He walks you through an app that's similar to Digg. This will get you into the Model-View-Controller mind set.
If you want to go further, I would suggest Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition by Sam Ruby, Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson. I would suggest the PDF because I use it as a reference and searching within the 774 pages is helpful to say the least. This is my favorite but definitely not a starter book. It's broken into two halves. The first half is a tutorial on how to write a shopping cart. With this example you get into the database models, migrations, sessions, helpers, ajax, routes, security - shows you how to create your own authentication process and more. The second half of the book is more of a reference guide and goes into greater depth than the application tutorial.
From here I would look into plugins to help you out. Search on www.github.com. They host a lot of the open source plugins available. Don't go too wild on plugins because too many will defeat the principles of being RESTful. For security/authentication I would reccomend Authlogic. I still think it's beneficial to go through the tutorial on how to create your own authentication (from the Agile Web Development with Rails book) to see what actually goes into this plugin.
Lastly, but not the least bit important is to start thinking about how you will deploy your app. You may think this is trivial but the longer you put it off, the harder it will become. Look into capistrano and deprec gems (plugins) to deploy onto a VPS. I've had numerous problems deploying to a shared host.
Don't start with the most complicated part of rails like I did. Work from the guides first and get into more complicated apps. Rails has a pretty steep learning curve.
Hope this helps.
Found your post while I was looking for the same thing, this blog post was useful:
http://blog.chrislowis.co.uk/2010/05/31/five-rails-apps-to-study-and-learn-from.html
The Real World Rails repo brings 100+ (and growing) active, open source Rails apps together in one repository using git submodules.
You can clone the collected codebases and learn from Rails apps written by experienced developers. You’ll find all the codebases in the apps/ subdirectory.
Apps you'll find there include Discourse, Diaspora, GitLab, Hound, Rails Contributors, and the Ruby Gems web site.

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