Tuesday 05 May 2009

Wilderness CMS Rails 2.3 Engines Plugin

I recently started working on what I thought was going to be an extension on the Bort Rails starter-site idea which I am a huge fan of. My initial idea was to include a default user admin panel but then I kept going and it evolved into something more elaborate. I’m not sure if I’m finished, or how I want it to function... More

Wednesday 29 April 2009

Rails before_ callbacks must return true gotcha

Spent a heck of a long time trying to figure out why my Cucumber tests were failing this afternoon. I assumed it had to do with an API key problem (this test/model involved a spam checking service) until I discovered that “If a before_* callback returns false, all the later callbacks and the associated action are cancelled.” Cucumber was providing no feedback, and I was having no such problems when using the site myself. So I finally discovered, thanks to some other poor souls who w... More

Wednesday 15 April 2009

Note To Self: Rails To Do List

I am in the habit of keeping multiple random text file to do lists for projects, on my desktop generally. It’s not ideal. I was pleased when it occurred to me just now to get in the habit of putting a todo.rb file in a Rails project folder that defines a TODOLIST constant, and then requiring it in development.rb, only showing the list if that second constant is defined, in this way you can keep the list going in development mode even after the site has been deployed. More

Thursday 09 April 2009

acts_as_versioned_with_changes

Acts As Versioned is a very cool gem from technoweenie that will store versioned copies of your main table in a secondary _versions table. One problem I noticed in trying to get it running was that running sudo gem install acts_as_versioned grabbed what appeared to be a very old copy which failed miserably with Rails 2.3 due to the older version not being compatible with the new ‘dirty’ object functionality added in Rails 2.1, so I found I had to clone it from the github repo: ... More

Friday 02 January 2009

Deploying Rails 2.2 to Webfaction

WebFaction is my Rails host of choice - the prices are good, the service is great, I love the Mongrel hosting, I have experienced no downtime, the support is excellent, generally no complaints. This is my procedure for deploying a Rails application to Webfaction without Capistrano. Allow create default rails app during account setup Upload your application on top of default Rails app ... More