RubyGeek

Well — anyone who knows me know that I love ruby… and perl next, and PHP comes in last of my favorite development languages. So of course when mom needed a website for her Bakery, I was going to do it in Ruby! I spent time getting my environment setup… threw it in subversion… setup a staging area on my server.. got some verbage, some photos and then finaly ready to hammer out the code.

I needed about 10 or so pages and an image gallery that would be easy to post photos to. I did a site a few years ago with Rails and file_column plugin and it was fantastic. I did it in 2 days and it was wonderful.

I am not quite sure what the problem was but I couldn’t get file_column to work for nothing! .. so I tried acts_as_attachment… no luck there either. i was using rails 1.2.2 on live and staging… i searched and searched on the errors I was having and no luck! PHOOOOOOOOEEEEYY! I decided to just use Dreamweaver Templates (which actually are quite nice for small sites if you want to avoid programming) and make a static site… to get at least SOMETHING UP!

I decided to use PHP’s Gallery to store photos, at least for the admin side. I had used it before and it has a fantastic java app called Gallery Remote that you run on your PC to upload photos. That’s easy. Then for some reason I thought - hey wonder whats up with Drupal? I went … I looked… hmm. So I downloaded it to my localhost and installed. Very nice! So I put it up on my moms site and configured it, added a module to connect to gallery — and within 2 days I was done. Sure I needed a few more little things, but that was way more then I could ever hope to accomplish with my homegrown site in rails.

So rails, I’m a little miffed at you. i wonder, are there too many cooks in the kitchen? are you getting kinda too big too fast? or am I just lazy and didn’t want to write a file upload, image resizing code myself? I didn’t use scaffolding for some parts and did TDD as I went along! I dunno…

I’ve always liked the Gallery codebase, its fantastic and Drupal as well. I’ve used and developed custom code for both. With good codebases, PHP doesn’t seem so bad. I might actually see if I can contribute to those projects.

I’m not saying that Rails == Drupal … using Rails would have certainly been more coding on my part, but the end result is about the same. What I wanted to do with Rails, Drupal had most of it done for me.

BTW, if you want to see the bakery site, check it out. We have a new logo and color scheme in the works!