Yesterday I started making a website for my church. I basically want to create a glorified address book where church members can go to update their contact information and look up the contact info of others. Nothing to write home about, I know, but it is a good excuse to learn Ruby on Rails and to use a new programming project management suite I found called Unfuddle.
First, Unfuddle.
Unfuddle is a project management tool developed specifically for managing programming projects. I have yet to explore it completely, but it looks to be very promising. It has milestones, tasks, timesheets, svn/git hosting, and some wiki style pages. It’s basically a perfect integration of trac/svn/mediawiki that is already setup and hosted for you. Plus, it’s API exposes nearly every aspect of the system so you can build widgets and mashups until your heart is content.
I hope to be using Unfuddle a lot in the future (hopefully I can convince my employer to make the switch), but for right now I’m just taking advantage of their free 200MB of SVN storage.
Now onto everyone’s favorite buzzword, Ruby on Rails
I’ve had a number of false starts into the RoR world over the past few years (I even developed a plugin a few years ago), but I have never completed a project using RoR. Hopefully now I will have the motivation to do so. I’ll jot down a few of the things I learned yesterday (even the horribly embarrassing ones)
- Don’t forget the = after <% if you want to output. I spent about 1 hour trying to figure out why my layout wouldn’t yield.
- There is no built in email model validation, but there’s a pretty sweet plugin named validates_email_format_of. RFC 2822, RFC 3696, yada yada yada.
- If you want to use the flash scope, but don’t want your variable hanging around for the next request, use flash.now().
