README.md

A simple cms built for the purpose of learning Ruby on Rails. Wanna check it out?

Sign in here with the details superadmin@pho.sx / password

Feel free to make changes.

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##Whats Inside?

• Page management & Post Management with spiffy support for markdown editing & live preview.
• Post tags powered with ajaxy goodness
• Basic menu management & easily configurable settings
• Admin management with basic privileges for Superadmins
• All bundled in a slick, bootstrap powered, responsive interface

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##What did I learn? Heaps.

Some of the things I feel I really understand about rails after completing this project include:

• Routing, Resorces, Namespacing
• Ajax & Javascript in a rails environment
• Rails' Asset pipeline
• Templating
• HAML
• Validations
• Associations
• Debugging
• Responding, Rendering, Redirecting
• Using external Modules/Classes
• Rails CLI / Server / Console

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##What would I do differently now?

• Testing!. Having built this I really appreciate the potential value of writing automated tests to make sure changes & refactoring don't break code
• DRY up my code. There's a bit of repetition that I don't love, particularly between posts & pages, that could be abstracted or put into a parent class and extended.
• Settings & Menus have the same model/controller but different ui. I think I would seperate them if I did it again.
• Use a Gem for pretty page/post slugs.
• There's plenty of things I'd add if this was going to be something I was planning to use commercially. For now though, I've learnt a lot and want to get on to the next projects.

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##Gems Used

• haml - HAML syntax for templating
• bootstrap-sass - Bootstrap for easy styling
• pagedown-bootstrap-rails - Pagedown MarkDown editor
• redcarpet - Markdown Renderer
• rails-settings-cached - Settings Management Module
• will_paginate - Pagination Module
• will_paginate-bootstrap - Pagination integration with BootStrap
• devise - Authentication
• exception_handler - Exception handler gem for custom 404/5** error pages
• html2haml - Development - Gem to automatically generate Haml from Html/Erb
• pry-rails - Development - Cleaner console

Resources Used

Probably a few more than this but these were bookmarked...

#####Associations

• Tagging from Scratch in Rails

#####Routes

• Scoping Rails Routes
• Using Rails Namespaces for Admin Actions
• Rails Routing from the Outside In

#####Settings

• Settings Gem

#####Custom Errors

• Redirecting to Custom 404 and 500 Pages in Rails

#####Forms

• Form Helpers - Rails Guides

#####Validations

• Active Record Validations

#####Migrations

• http://guides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.html
• Rails Migration Cheat Sheet

#####Asset Pipeline

• The Asset Pipeline

#####Slug / Url

• Custom Slugs in Rails Without Gems

#####Exceptions

• Ruby Exceptions

#####Rails Cron

• Whenever Gem - Crons in Ruby
• Heroku scheduler and Rails rake tasks