→ nycruby
Who we are
We’re a group of Ruby and Rails programmers who live and work in the New York City area. Developers and dilettantes of all skill levels are welcome.Meeting Place and Time
We meet on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. The first meeting centers on presentations by one or more group members, and the second meeting is an unstructured hackfest (bring your laptop).
I’m finally going to make it to the local rails meetup tomorrow night.
Introducing Backlight
Nearly every web project I Am Still Alive has produced for clients in the last year has required some content management system. In all of those cases, I’ve provided a Rails-built custom-designed backend app to manage the various sites.
Over the last few months, I have organized the diverse functions (blog, photo gallery, tagging, drag-drop sorting, user authentication, contact management, geolocation, e-commerce, event management, ...) into one stable, flexible system that I can redeploy fairly effortlessly. It’s been working out well and clients have really taken to the system.
I have taken to calling the app ‘Backlight’ as it largely started coming together while working on sites for a pair of photographers (launching shortly).
In any case, it’s my plan to repurpose and then release Backlight as a hosted service (websites with custom domains hosted/powered by one app) in the next few weeks. I am going to post updates every now and again about the process of refining it further in the run up to launch. The app is actually quite similar to the hosted artist portfolio management system we have in the works over at Artlog.
has_many :through with has_many_polymorphs
So, I have been using Evan Weaver’s awesome has_many_polymorphs rails plugin for a while now. It has saved me a lot of frustration, for sure. Evan is also working up a tagging generator for has_many_polymorphs which should help solidify has_many_polymorphs position as the replacement for acts_as_taggable (which is basically deprecated at this point, I think). The plugin is actually much more than just a tagging engine tho. You can have a look at the plugin’s own page for a full (and current) run down of what has_many_polymorphs can do.
For a couple recent projects, I have used has_many_polymorphs to set up has_many :through relationships and it’s actually been such a boon that I reckon it may benefit other folks for me to commit the process to writing.
