I’m working on a project that is using the latest Rails markup buzz, namely Compass, SASS and HAML, so it’s time to begin the learning process. Part of that effort will be to convert my personal Rails project over to Compass et. al. I found that the best approach seems to be to install all the required gems manually before doing anything else. That is: Installing HAML also installs SASS, which is pretty convenient. Then install the basic compass gem. Compass supports a few standard stylesheet frameworks: 960gs, blueprint and YUI. I’m using 960. For Rails integration, you can either build a new Rails project, or you can choose to… Read More
Continue ReadingIntegrating OpenID with Authlogic
I won’t take any credit here. If you want to do this, jump right over to the Ryan Bates Railscast Number 170. He totally nails it – just follow along and adjust for the views you are actually using, and it’s operational in a jiffy. Sweet! The only thing that didn’t work for me was the install for the open_id_authentication plugin. I had to copy and install the files manually. I note that the install worked when I tried it again while writing this article, so maybe it was a temporary github problem. It’s a funny thing about OpenID, though. When I ask my technically competent acquaintances about it, the… Read More
Continue ReadingWordPress Under Rails
There have been occasional discussions about integrating a WordPress CMS into a Rails application. One approach is to simply do a WordPress install under RAILS_ROOT/public/blog. That’s pretty straightforward: cd RAILS_ROOT/public mkdir blog cd blog svn co http://core.svn.wordpress.org/tags/2.8.4 . Then do the usual WordPress setup ritual. If you’re running Phusion Passenger, you need to tell Passenger to ignore the WordPress stuff: I did this setup last night, and now my Rails app has a built-in, full-featured blog. The down side to this approach is that you now have yukky PHP code “polluting” your Rails directory structure, and it also implies that you have a lot of control over your Apache server.… Read More
Continue ReadingChanging IDEs
I have been bouncing between the RadRails and NetBeans IDEs for quite some time now. I like them both a lot, but I have not been able to make RadRails Test::Unit work 100% with Ruby 1.9.x. The 1.8.x version works fine, and I know there are some changes between the two Rubys that affect testing, but I have not done a complete analysis of the changes. In any event, I have switched to NetBeans 6.5.1 simply because I can run my Rails test suites with Ruby 1.9 and everything works. Of course the real solution is to get my professional and financial houses in order, acquire a MacBook Pro running… Read More
Continue ReadingSoftware S&M: Rails Development on Windows XP
(Professionals on closed course. Do not attempt this at home.) I love my new company, but it’s an IT staffing outfit, not a software development organization. Sure, it would have been nice to equip the Rails team with new Macs and a dedicated SQL server, but what was actually available was a couple of Dell desktops running Windows XP. So be it – three people on the team, one on a Mac, two on Windows. Can we make this work? The first order of business was to move the design environment from SVN to the Git versioning system. You can do this by installing git as part of the Cygwin… Read More
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