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This project was a bit different as we completed two separate blogs. Our first blog was put together using the open-source blogging engine Typo, and we took some extra time as we went through that to gain a deeper understanding of how Rails works. Afterward, building our own blog engine sounded like fun, so we created a simple blogging engine with support for features like the MetaWeblog API and an RSS feed. This chapter contains a number of ideas that you can use to continue your own personal development and enhance the applications.

In this first phase of the project, we’re going to build a basic web comic site that will allow us to upload our comics. Let’s start out by creating a new project named webcomic, using the instructions from Chapter 2. With our basic application structure ready, we need to start thinking about exactly what it is that we want to build. What are some of the key features of a web comic? Obviously, we’ll need to make it easy to upload and display new comics, but taking a look around the web at some of the popular web comics, we can see several other key features that we’ll want to support:

Things have been going great for our little web comic. The site has been running like a champ, and our readership has continued to grow. Page caching has served the site extremely well, as it’s been able to maintain consistent growth without having to add any additional processing.

In this project, we explored the powerful concepts of caching Rails applications as we put together a very simple web comic application. I pointed out some of the pros and cons of each of the different levels of caching that Rails supports and how they affected our application design. This chapter contains a number of ideas for you to use while enhancing the web comic application.

For the purpose of this application, we’ll pretend that we’re building a site for a small church consisting of less than a hundred members. We’ll start out by implementing support for users and user created content in this chapter. Once we have the ability to allow users to login and create content we’ll move onto creating some simple community focused tools such as a community home page and a user directory in the next chapter.

In our last chapter, we built a fair amount of functionality to allow the users of our mini community to populate the site with their own content. However, there are few nagging items still missing from our application. In this chapter, we’re going to finish up our application by adding a common navigation scheme throughout, building a community home page, and adding in some basic community tools such as a user directory.

In this project, we put together a simple community application designed to foster community within a small group of users such as a local church, family, or users group. We provided a few basic tools for this community, including a user directory, photo galleries, blogging, and commenting. These are the generic things that would be useful for any mini community.

As I stated, the current administrative system was written years ago in PHP4 with a MySQL backend and has served our buddy’s site well, but the application’s code has been maintained by a variety of pasta-loving amateur developers, which has led to a number of maintenance issues. For one, the site is an incredible hassle to maintain—even simple changes to the application often take days to complete and cause many other things to break. Second, the application’s interface hasn’t adapted and evolved with the needs of the site and has now become rather cumbersome for the staff to use. So Ron (the owner of the site) has opted that his best option before talking to any more buyers is to refresh the site, starting with the administrative tools that the staff uses on a daily basis.

As you saw in the last chapter, even with no configuration or code added, our basic Rails application was able to connect to and read in some simple data from the legacy database—at least, it could until we attempted to do anything more useful than pulling in the first record. In this chapter, we’re going to solve that problem as we build the necessary models to allow our Rails application to communicate correctly with some of the core models of the gaming site. Once we have the models speaking correctly, we’ll move onto building the first few pages of our administration application, which will be used to manage those records. We’ll start in the most obviously useful place with building support for the games records, as they are the core resource of our application.

In the previous chapter, we built the capacity for our new administration system to manage the game records for our friend’s gaming web site. While maintaining a database of all the games is important, since this is primarily a content site, it’s critically important that new content is pumped through the site in order to keep visitors coming back on a regular basis. Ron keeps the site fresh through a variety of content such as daily news, press releases, reviews and previews of games, interviews with developers, and so forth. While each of those is important for the success of the site, the one that keeps readers coming back every day is the news—Ron and his staff provide daily content on the latest gaming news and information as it’s occurring. Whether it’s reporting about a newly revealed feature in an upcoming PlayStation 3 game or rumors of a potential price drop on the Nintendo Wii, daily news is a huge draw of the site; it’s one of the most visited pages. It’s also the page that cycles through the most content daily. On any given day, the staff can add two to twenty news stories.