Simply on Rails?

Saturday, 30 June 2007

So finally my site is back up, I don't have to worry about coding anymore: just writing about whatever I like, no more Cake, no more MVC, no more frameworks…

What do you mean no coding anymore? You've been bragging about how this Rails thing is fast, how you can develop things easily, and this, and that… You know what you have to do now

^{^} That was my fiancée, actually, and she's right: my web development days are far from being over, actually. I admit I tried to get away from it, but she kindly reminded me (and she can be very persuasive) that now I have to fix ItalySimply, the site I created a while a go (4 years?) with a mixture of Mambo (the CMS, now Joomla) and spaghetti PHP.

A sort-of-real-estate thingie visited by people who want to move to Italy or simply buy a house here. And it's due a makeover, to be honest.

How am I gonna manage this? Let's see…

COW

COW \- Code On Week-ends. my web development methodology: simple, effective, basically my only choice. Actually the full name is COW (IYL): Code On Week-ends If You're Lucky, i.e.: if we're not going out, if there's nothing better to do, if I feel like it. No deadlines (almost), no plans to follow, nothing.

No, I'm not terribly motivated to take on this project, but I already thought about two things to get me going:

Get Agile Web Development with Rails \- I read bits of the first edition, and that's what got me started with Rails, now it's time to buy the real thing.
Blog about it \- I'll try to keep a diary of my coding efforts and share the most juicy bits with the rest of the world. In this way I'll also have content for my site and the three people who read this blog will have something (hopefully) interested to read.

The Cunning Plan ⇈

Instead of getting out of troubles by simply tidying up some PHP code or migrate the site to Joomla, I'd like to re-code the whole thing from scratch using Rails. Ideally I'd like to migrate quite a bit of the content (including the hundreds of houses with pictures which were published over the years), but at the moment I'm not thinking about it: after all, in the end the site will be so addictive and easy to use that adding hundreds of houses back on will be just so much fun! Right? Yeah, right…

First of all I'll spend quite a bit of time planning the application and what has to be done, then I'll have to practice a little bit with Rails, and then, eventually, I'll end up writing some code. Of course, suggestions and ideas will be more than welcome throughout all the process.

Let's see how it goes…