Scenario

We are Ruby on Rails developers (Silvio Relli and Matteo Papadopoulos) sharing the same office at Cantiere Creativo. As often happens in web agencies, for small or medium websites projects, the boss wanted a quick tool to setup a website, manage contents, reduce development time and costs.
Rails is our favourite framework but the admin interface is a big missing and build it from scratch all the time can take a while.

We didn’t want to use WordPress (max respect for this piece of software!) or others php based CMS.
Django could be the solution but we did prefer to use our favorite framework as we are more confident with it.

So, at the end, the solution is always the same: build your own CMS! Aaaarrrgghhh!!!! And we have done it! :)

We love to be part of the community and we absolutely wanted to share this project; we wanted Railsyard to be free and everybody can fork it and gives his contribution (or not!).

History

Railsyard is a CMS made with and for Ruby on Rails. It was born one year ago to build several websites for Cantiere Creativo, the company who invested on this project.

The first release of RY, built with Rails 2.3, was published on a GitHub repository but it was a first attempt written in “rush mode” (as often happens in software development).

What’s going on

In July 2011 we did release the second version of this CMS written from scratch in Rails 3 and Ruby 1.9.2 (but it can also run with 1.8.7). In August we made many commits of new features and debugs. This has been possibile thanks to a first project of a customer that is actually running in production. At the same time the community started it contribution (as hoped!) and @paul_spieker is actually a great contributor!

Features

From my point of view (front end designer), these are the main features:

• You can easily create own themes with your favourites tools (js, scss, sass ecc)
• Multilangs support for the whole contents and admin interface
• Has fews but usefull snippets ready to use
• It’s easy to build your own snippets for advanced personalisation
• It’s easy to design layouts and manage contents
• Has pages and articles
• You can manage meta information for each page.
• Has a really good WYSIWYG editor
• Has an intuitive drag and drop admin interface
• pretty urls and other seo-friendly features
• different user roles
• You have Rails behind and you can build your own controllers/model/views

A first public theme has been release in these days. It’s not so “beauty” and it’s called “rough“. We just wanted to give a first simple theme, extremely cleaned, with three different layouts (one, two and three columns); it’s a basic theme to let users to be free to personalize the css and design for a new own theme. It uses a responsive grid system (fixed or fluid) with an html5 markup, scss and jquery.

Next step will be e good looking theme just to show how Railsyard can be used with different templates.

Lot of features and good proposals are still in our mind and we are really excited of this tool that is growing up, day by day! Stay tuned, it changes quickly! Have a look and enjoy it!

I’m actually working on this project with @silviorelli

Update 9 november 2011

Following yesterday’s coverage of Railsyard on ruby5, here you can find some direct resources for tracking our progresses:

• official railsyard twittter account: @railsyard
• official project page: http://www.railsyardcms.org
• Fork on GitHub GitHub repository
• Cantiere Creativo (the lead agency)
• Silvio Relli twitter account: @silviorelli
• and finally, my twitter account: @spleenteo

Al contrario di molte conferenze a cui siamo da anni abituati, Better Software è un momento esaltante di estremo interesse per gli addetti ai lavori dell’informatica a cui interessa innovazione e qualità. Da non perdere!

Consulta il sito Better Software per scoprire il prgramam completo degli interventi oppure segui il canale twitter per tutte le novità!

Dal sito riporto:

Better Software è la prima conferenza Italiana dedicata allo sviluppo di software e rivolta a imprenditori e manager del settore. Better Software è un’opportunità per intrecciare relazioni durature con nuovi clienti e partner.

A popular misconception is that distributed systems are ill-suited for projects requiring an official central repository. Nothing could be further from the truth. Photographing someone does not cause their soul to be stolen. Similarly, cloning the master repository does not diminish its importance.

A good first approximation is that anything a centralized version control system can do, a well-designed distributed system can do better. Network resources are simply costlier than local resources. While we shall later see there are drawbacks to a distributed approach, one is less likely to make erroneous comparisons with this rule of thumb.

A small project may only need a fraction of the features offered by such a system, but using systems that scale poorly for tiny projects is like using Roman numerals for calculations involving small numbers.

Moreover, your project may grow beyond your original expectations. Using Git from the outset is like carrying a Swiss army knife even though you mostly use it to open bottles. On the day you desperately need a screwdriver you’ll be glad you have more than a plain bottle-opener.

This is the “Silly superstition” paragraph you can find on GIT MAGIC a “must seen” document you need to read to better understand GIT.

Obviously you can get directly from git repository like GITHUB

$ git clone git://github.com/blynn/gitmagic.git

I’ve mentioned GITHUB (a free git repository for public projects) because I’ve sign my first profile few weeks ago to share some projects and to fork projects from others developers.

Please, visit my page at http://github.com/spleenteo

I also do reccomend TitusD profile that is really active in it’s productions!

At the end I’ve fount a little patch on the web and I’m trying here to explain it to new users, not familiar with patch.

1. go into the module directory “sites/all/modules/tagadelic” and open the file tagadelic.module with your favourite editor
2. goto line 215 (or around there) and change the line “

   $cache = cache_get($cache_name);" to $cache = cache_get($cache_name, 'cache_block');<br /></pre></li><li>goto line 228 and do the same: change<br /><pre>cache_set($cache_name, $tags); to <br />cache_set($cache_name, $tags, 'cache_block', CACHE_TEMPORARY);

upload the file and the problem will magically disappear.

Original source thanks to: http://drupal.org/node/231030

Brutale mna efficace al scelta di convertire tutti questi apostrofi con il singolo apice ‘

  $patterns[0] = ‘/[\x82\x91\x92]/’;
  $replacements[0] = “‘”;
  $txt = preg_replace($patterns, $replacements, “Governatore d’Italia”);

che renderà “Governatore d’Italia”

Aptana Studio is fully installed on my laptop but, when I try to install the RedRails plugin, it returns this error:

Requested operation cannot be performed because it would invalidate the current configuration. See details for more information.

Ruby Mylyn Connector Feature (Optional) (0.9.3.6479) requires feature
"org.eclipse.mylyn.context_feature (2.0.0.v20070628-1000)", or later version.

The solution: http://support.aptana.com/issues/browse/ROR-156

The most important steps are:

1. Went to Help=>Updates=>Find and Install. Installed three Eclipse updates that the system found. Installation of updates worked ok.
2. When the update window appears with RadRails updates, expand the tree and uncheck the box next to the Ruby Mylyn Connector Feature. This is an optional extension for users of Mylyn. You don’t need it, so you can safely uncheck the box and install.

This seems to works either on Windows, Osx and Linux