Ruby on Rails with CMS and other fun stuff

Been working about a month now on a Ruby on Rails project. The goal of the product is to make a site that can be spun up numerous times as a Saas product. I has to include  CMS elements Settings area to change logo, colors etc. Connect to a remote SOAP API to create cloneable content from and users. User admin area with Roles Reporting Ckeditor that integrates with Paperclip on non-cms pages.

August 13, 2013 Read
Paperclip and S3 and Ckeditor

This took a bit. On the first site it was easy. I went through these directions to get ckeditor setup with paperclip. And paperclip is easy to setup with S3 but on this site you are reading now the url Amazon used was not s3.amazonaws.com/nutilesblog but s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/nutilesblog  Paperclip was defaulting to s3 and I had trouble getting the combinations for this setting right. Maybe I could have set the bucket to use s3 but in the end I rather deal with the s3-us-west-2 since different clients will have different needs.

August 11, 2013 Read
RubyMine and BetterErrors

https://github.com/charliesome/better_errors/wiki good help here on loading RubyMine from BetterErrors

August 11, 2013 Read
Installing mysql2 on a mac

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5919727/bundle-install-problem-mysql-h-is-missing This was key to get this install done.

August 9, 2013 Read
Paperclip and S3

Great gem for attaching images to a rails app (maybe even Laravel). This article made it clear how to set this up https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/paperclip-s3 And this one made it clear why my development environment was not working. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11760597/s3-paperclip-working-on-heroku-but-not-localhost I had to edit my .bash_profile But instead of restarting the terminal I just did source ~/.bash_profile and then started that rails server again in that terminal. If only I found a tutorial on using fog and paperclip since I am already using that gem for refinerycms

July 16, 2013 Read
Capistrano for non-rails sites

I've been using capistrano for Rails and really impressed by how easy it makes deployment and rolllback. Sometimes though I need this type of automation on non-rails work. This type of automation can include setting up a vhost in Apache as well as Travis CI work. I know Chef-solo might be best for this but since I am already in Capistrano I might as well push it a little more.

July 8, 2013 Read
Refinery CMS and Twitter Bootstrap

This worked out quite easily on a project that I am working on. (not yet released) At the command line I had to run the needed code to copy the views to my app. Here are some commands I ran thoug this command rake refinery:override will show other options as well. rake refinery:override view=refinery/_site_bar rake refinery:override view=refinery/_content_page rake refinery:override view=refinery/_menu rake refinery:override view=refinery/_head

July 7, 2013 Read
Technologies for a Saas

I had to review for a client what CMS to choose. Keeping in mind the CMS was only part of the product and a small part. Small in that the big value to the product seem to fall more on the APP part of the project that allowed the user to make a question set from an JSON based API. So a bulk of the work would be building that.

July 7, 2013 Read
Angular.js Ticket System

Fun side project to make a ticket system in Angular.js. Still have to build out the authentication system and ideally move the api into Rails. And of course wrap up a few other things ( -; http://angular.alfrednutile.info/ Or the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjCJNn7wpj0

July 5, 2013 Read
My first Rails site for the masses.

First Rails site for the masses for me. Thanks to Progressive Exchange http://www.progressiveexchange.org/welcome.htm I was able to volunteer for a webapp for Doctors for America http://www.drsforamerica.org/ So not only do I get to learn Ruby on Rails and practice but I get to build something for a good group and purpose. This app had to allow staff to enter and manage Speaker Requests and Speakers data as well as allow the public to view a Calendar of the upcoming events, filter as needed and submit a requests.

June 27, 2013 Read
Vagrant and Laravel

Most likely for any internal server I had to run command php artisan serve –host=“0.0.0.0” to access the port forwarding feature of vagrant Update: I had to also make sure to set the forward to the same as the original 8000 So my Vagrant file looked like this gist

June 25, 2013 Read
Making lists from acts_as_taggable

This took some time to figure out but I finally found a post on stack exchange. Even RailsCasts has a how-to on making a tag cloud, as well as act_as_taggable’s guthub page. But I just could not see how to limit to a context other than :tag So maybe I was missing the obvious but all I wanted was to output a clickable list on a sidebar so users can filter content from that list.

June 9, 2013 Read