Plans on Rails?

[Ian Young]

Hi all,

I'm considering migrating Plans to Ruby on Rails. I've been toying with the idea for some time now, so I thought I'd ping the dev list and solicit feedback.

Clearly development is pretty stagnant right now. Our hopes for greater community participation have never really materialized. I don't know if moving to Rails would spur any new participation, but there are reasons it might, and there are reasons it would be a good change even if it doesn't. My current job is almost full-time Rails, so I've gotten a pretty good idea of what the platform is capable of, and how it stacks up to PHP.

Reasons:

 * Developing in Rails is *fast*. Really, really fast. It's also quite fun. Rails is an incredibly powerful framework, and pretty mature at this point, and there's a thriving ecosystem feeding it. Vast swaths of our current code could be handled by Rails and various popular gems.
 * I know of no PHP frameworks (but especially not our jury-rigged one) that offer the same level of power in such a painless fashion. Right now we have exactly 2 active developers. I have very little motivation to work on new features because doing anything that isn't an ugly hack takes a considerable amount of effort. As such, progress is pretty much stalled. If I could produce quality code much more quickly, I'd be more interested in putting continued time into Plans development.
 * Rails is easy to learn and very standardized. Which means that anyone can bring previous experience to our project and be able to contribute right away. Or they can take away their experience from our project and have it be useful elsewhere. I know the startup cost of understanding our current system has been a hurdle for some interested people.
 * Rails is very hip right now. More to the point, there are bajillions of Rails jobs right now. Demonstrable experience on an OSS Rails project would be a great bullet point for students angling for a first job (or a better new job).

Open questions:

 * "Rails is slow" gets tossed around a lot as a reason not to use it. The Rails community complains that this is an unfair and outdated stereotype, and I tend to believe them due to the sheer number of important projects and companies that are now using it. I also would be very surprised if the bottleneck in our app proved to be un-optimizable Rails slowness, and not, say, MySQL calls. But I'm not an expert on performance, so I can't speak with authority. This issue could use further exploration.
 * Time to rewrite. Important, because if development stalls out halfway through, it's unlikely to ever finish. Like I said, development in Rails is fast, and Plans is almost perfectly suited to what the framework does well. So compared to the cost of rewriting it in PHP, this is orders of magnitude less. However, it's foolish to underestimate any sufficiently complicated software project.
 * The fate of non-core features. Pertinent to the previous point, there are certain features of Plans that would drastically increase rewrite time, and that frankly I am not interested in rewriting. Some, like Jumble, I expect to go quietly into the abyss. Others, namely Notes, will prove more controversial. If we completely remove Notes, a certain faction is guaranteed to complain long and loud, and at any rate that's a serious enough decision that I cannot make it unilaterally. It's possible that we could slowly reintroduce some of these features after the primary rewrite is finished (and in fact I have some ideas about how to reimagine Notes in a more Plans-specific fashion). Or it's possible we could shunt it off to some 3rd-party code (after all, Notes is just a bulletin board using Plans for authentication). At any rate, this definitely needs more thought and some sort of community discussion.

There's the outline. Let's hear thoughts.

Ian

[Anna Carey]

From a developer's perspective, I'd say "Hell yes! move to rails"
However, I'd need to be sold on the idea from the perspective of and
end user. Plans is stable. We know it and love it for its
simplicity. What kind of feature changes would you want to make, and
why? And, who has the right to make a decision to alter plans in any
significant way?

That being said, I'm personally pretty excited by having plans in
rails, and would love to start working on it.
Anna

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[Shitanshu Aggarwal]

Hi,
As Ian mentioned, moving to Rails has many benefits. Rails is really hot right now. I feel like the implicit emphasis on coding conventions in Ruby would work out very nicely for an open project like Plans. As far as selling it to the users goes, having the PHP and Rails version running simultaneously could help ease the transition. Not only would it allow the users to experience the latest iteration of Plans, the Devs could get some real feedback on the code and feature set. That said, I can see that running them concurrently on the same data could be painful. I don't think the conventions in Rails would allow us to use the same database. But maybe there is some migrations magic I don't know of. Also, I've heard that Rails is MUCH more test friendly than PHP.
I would happily contribute to the codebase!
Shitanshu

--
Shitanshu Aggarwal

[Tom Baldwin]

Hi all,

Ian makes a good point here:

Right now we have exactly 2 active developers. I have very little motivation to work on new features because doing anything that isn't an ugly hack takes a considerable amount of effort. As such, progress is pretty much stalled. If I could produce quality code much more quickly, I'd be more interested in putting continued time into Plans development.

I just want to echo this. I've hung around you devs for years now and still not submitted a single patch, and this is more or less the reason. Whenever I try to contribute something there are a myriad of obstacles which hang me up.

 - As has been said, the source tree is pretty cluttered and kludged. This makes adding new features a challenge, but I don't think that alone justifies a rewrite. Some source cleanup could be all right, and I wish I could help with that, but
 - setting up a development environment is a nightmare. It's just a nightmare. Anyone who wants to help develop needs to configure their own LAMP stack, plus some obscure PHP modules (xdiff?) which I don't think are even used.
- Even after getting the dev environment up, a test database is needed. Someone (Ian I believe) provided a nice dbase with fake data a while back, but that hasn't been kept current with the rest of plans to my knowledge. It didn't work for me, and faced with the prospect of reverse engineering which columns had been added based on recent commits to the source, I decided I'd rather drink.

So I agree: moving to a web framework could really lower the barrier to entry for people like me. As a Python person I immediately think of Django, which has a development server built in, and defines the database schema in code separately from the database itself (addressing points #2 and #3 above). I imagine Rails is a similar sort of thing.

This is a great idea, but like you said, it's
 - a huge amount of work to rewrite everything
 - bound to leave some users' favorite features behind

and to that I would add that it could be
 - difficult for us to decide/agree on which framework to move to
 - a big hassle for everybody to learn ruby or python or perl whatever it ends up being.

My two cents.

tk

[Ian Young]

Hey Anna,

The short answer of what further work needs to be done is the list of
unresolved tickets in our issue tracker:
http://code.google.com/p/grinnellplans/issues/list. There are lots of
feature requests, ranging from the very small to the pie-in-the-sky.
There are also a fair number of unresolved bugs, generally small
annoyances that no one has bothered to fix.

As for who has the authority to make changes, that's a tricky question.
I like Ian A's term, "a consensus-based do-ocracy". As developers, a lot
of the things we work on are obvious improvements, so little discussion
needs to happen. This case is clearly different. The Plans admins need
to be on board, and probably get the final say. But I wouldn't feel good
without also trying to inform and involve the community to make sure
that any decision truly benefits Plans as a whole. This is the first
step of that. At a later point, I'll probably solicit feedback on my
plan, on notes, and perhaps by getting an admin to put a message on the
homepage. Ian A's process for setting up donations seems like a good
example to follow.

Ian

[Ian Young]

On 2/24/11 11:14 AM, Shitanshu Aggarwal wrote:
> Hi,
> As Ian mentioned, moving to Rails has many benefits. Rails is really hot
> right now. I feel like the implicit emphasis on coding conventions in
> Ruby would work out very nicely for an open project like Plans. As far
> as selling it to the users goes, having the PHP and Rails version
> running simultaneously could help ease the transition. Not only would it
> allow the users to experience the latest iteration of Plans, the Devs
> could get some real feedback on the code and feature set. That said, I
> can see that running them concurrently on the same data could be
> painful. I don't think the conventions in Rails would allow us to use
> the same database. But maybe there is some migrations magic I don't know
> of.

Rails is actually fairly helpful about dealing with old data. The naming
conventions can all be overridden. The trickier part is sharing
authorization between PHP and Rails. Then again, it's possible that the
current fully-in-cookie sessions will make this easy to deal with. Or
maybe we can punt and just have people log in a second time if they want
to use the old version.

This type of setup wouldn't be tenable for the long term, but for a few
weeks of transition, it may be a very good idea. We tried to do
something similar when I rewrote a large part of the view code, but I
think our mistake was calling it a beta and having it operate on a copy
of the DB instead of the real DB, so nobody bothered to use it. A better
route would be to send everyone to the new system by default, and give
them a way to opt-out back to the old system (think New Twitter).

> Also, I've heard that Rails is MUCH more test friendly than PHP.

Absolutely. One of my goals if we rewrite is full test coverage, and I
will not generally accept patches without accompanying tests.

Ian

[Ian Young]

On 2/24/11 11:49 AM, Tom Baldwin wrote:
> - setting up a development environment is a nightmare. It's just a
> nightmare. Anyone who wants to help develop needs to configure their own
> LAMP stack, plus some obscure PHP modules (xdiff?) which I don't think
> are even used.
> - Even after getting the dev environment up, a test database is needed.
> Someone (Ian I believe) provided a nice dbase with fake data a while
> back, but that hasn't been kept current with the rest of plans to my
> knowledge. It didn't work for me, and faced with the prospect of reverse
> engineering which columns had been added based on recent commits to the
> source, I decided I'd rather drink.
>
> So I agree: moving to a web framework could really lower the barrier to
> entry for people like me. As a Python person I immediately think of
> Django, which has a development server built in, and defines the
> database schema in code separately from the database itself (addressing
> points #2 and #3 above). I imagine Rails is a similar sort of thing.

I forgot to mention this, but yes, definitely. Hopefully setting up a
dev environment will involve running about two rake tasks and firing up
the built-in server, and that's it. The dev database can probably run on
sqlite, so no need to even install mysql.

> and to that I would add that it could be
> - difficult for us to decide/agree on which framework to move to

This is where the do-ocracy takes effect. If I'm doing this, I'm doing
it in Rails. If someone wants a different framework and provides most of
the doing power, that's great, and I'll probably be willing to help out.
But if I'm leading the effort, it's Rails.

> - a big hassle for everybody to learn ruby or python or perl whatever
> it ends up being.

Luckily, both 2 active developers have some familiarity with Ruby. It's
one of most newbie-friendly languages in use currently (Python being the
other), so if people gotta learn something, I'm happy to have them learn
it. And I believe Grinnell now has CS classes that are teaching Ruby
and/or Python...?

Ian

[Avram Lyon]

And Plans development makes another circle... In the [yellow tail] [1]
rewrite-Plans-in-one-week hack-a-thon that Josh Rosenbluh, Daren
Brantley, and I did back in 2004, our first code used a fancy new
framework called Ruby on Rails. Josh was crazy about it, I didn't care
much either way. We eventually switched to PHP 5 and never got around
to making a useable UI, having spent all of our time writing glue.

In the spirit of do-ocracy, I say power to you. Write away, keep us in
the loop and hope for the best. Rails sounds like fun.

My one suggestion is that you not drop any of the non-ridiculous
functionality-- jumble can go (and it can be reimplemented in about 10
minutes as a purely client-side jQuery toy), but don't lose notes. I
know that they're a hack and I've thought they're a failed gimmick
ever since they were written, but they have a following. This would
probably be a good time to migrate the whole affair to an existing
Rails forum system. Maybe improved forums would even make notes a more
lively piece of Plans.

Avram
_1: Who deleted the [yellow tail] plan?

[Anna Carey]

I was a bit bored today at work so I got started on a rough outline of
plans on rails.
you can check it out on github https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans
No more pain getting started. Provided you have rails installed, you
can just do
>bundle install
>rake db:setup
>rails server
I grabbed seed data from a test database I set up a few years ago,
hopefully it's not terribly out of date.

At this point the code is just a rough guess at the models.

[Ian Young]

Anna,

This is really cool! Thanks for getting things jumpstarted. I'm very encouraged by all the enthusiastic responses; makes me think this is a good direction to be moving.

Ian

[Megan Goering]

I am learning Ruby on Rails and would be stoked to contribute as I am able!

[Lindsey Kuper]

(Initiate de-lurking sequence in 3...2...1...)

I agree with a lot of the things Anna said. I'm pretty sure that any
of a number of off-the-shelf web frameworks would (eventually) improve
the organization of the Plans code, but Rails (or Django, too,
probably) is likely to attract more interest from potential
contributors than the various PHP frameworks would.

Since people are saying that Rails is "hip", I think I should point
out that In my experience, it doesn't seem to be as hip now as it was
a few years ago, but I hasten to add that that's not a bad thing.
Rails is more mature now, with a more vibrant ecosystem around it.
Also, the "Rails is slow" argument, to the extent that it's true,
doesn't really matter for Plans. Plans will never have millions of
people banging on it.

I'm kind of curious why Ian sounds unconcerned about the difficulty of
porting the core functionality of Plans to Rails, but pretty concerned
about the difficulty of porting Notes to Rails. Is there something
about Notes that makes it fundamentally hard to deal with?

Lindsey

[[michaelh]]

And another in favor of rails here. I'm unsure if using it will be
significantly easier to new developers, both environments have their
setup issues but one thing it does bring is a strong organizational
philosophy for the code. I hesitate to say that the current base does
not have that, but the conventions in rails have significantly more
momentum and documentation behind them.

As to performance, I agree that given the size of the user base we're
unlikely to run into any issues. At my day job we have many apps and
according to new relic we've dropped our average response time from
appx 500 ms down to about 150. Most of that was adding mysql indexes,
optimization of heavily used intensive queries, and patching up a 3rd
party CMS we included. Point being, it can be slow but it doesn't have
to be that way.

This feels like a good opportunity to label it a new version of plans
and move to github. As a do-ocracy it sounds like Anna has made a good
start, and I suggest that whoever cares most about source locations,
naming, etc, jump on it now, unless of course she is willing to keep
up the repo. :D

Also, the stylesheets are important. Notes are one thing, but if we
break everyones custom stylesheets it'll be a lot harder to sell.

[Ian Young]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 9:21 PM, Lindsey Kuper <lin...@rockstargirl.org> wrote:

I'm kind of curious why Ian sounds unconcerned about the difficulty of
porting the core functionality of Plans to Rails, but pretty concerned
about the difficulty of porting Notes to Rails.  Is there something
about Notes that makes it fundamentally hard to deal with?

Nothing about Notes is "hard" exactly, it's simply a big extra chunk of logic & view & styling that shares next to nothing with the rest of the codebase. I would estimate implementing it as maybe a quarter of the entire difficulty of the whole Plans project, and I think that's highly disproportionate to the amount of use it gets. So as far as what I'm personally willing to invest time in, Notes doesn't make the cut; that's certainly not stopping anyone else who wants to work on it. I tend to think Avram's probably right, the path of least resistance may be dropping a Rails BBS into place and leaving it at that.

FWIW, Secrets falls in a similar category, but I'm slightly more favorably inclined towards it because it is a) not as complex and b) offers a somewhat unique service to the community, even if it's not very integrated with core Plans.

Ian

[Ian Young]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 9:53 PM, [michaelh] <mab...@gmail.com> wrote:

This feels like a good opportunity to label it a new version of plans
and move to github. As a do-ocracy it sounds like Anna has made a good
start, and I suggest that whoever cares most about source locations,
naming, etc, jump on it now, unless of course she is willing to keep
up the repo. :D

Moving to Github permanently is a bit of an open question. I love the service, but am not sure if their minimalist issue tracking will prove sufficient for our needs. I'm happy to use it for now, though. I intend to make sure we're using either Git or Mercurial in the end, and AFAIK there are good tools to port history between the two.
 

Also, the stylesheets are important. Notes are one thing, but if we
break everyones custom stylesheets it'll be a lot harder to sell.

Yes, definitely a worthy goal. I'm optimistic that all the extraction of view logic I did in the PHP will make it relatively easy to keep the markup the same.

Ian

[CM Lubinski]

Sounds like a worthwhile effort.

Language:
Ruby was created first and foremost to be enjoyable for developers.
This is a great philosophy, but results in a fail with regards to
speed. Ruby's roots are in Smalltalk, and the "methods" act more like
message-passing. This means more layers of automatic run-time checks
for pretty much everything you do. That said, PHP is also slow,
particularly in the concept of parsing dozens of files for each
request. Given the size of the plans code base and community, I don't
think there'd be much of a speed change between languages. If you run
into any problems, you can always try popping your rails app on top of
the jvm by way of JRuby, which I hear runs faster.

Rails:
Rails was big a few years ago, and many of the web 2.0-y sites were
written in it. From what I understand, though, the rails community was
quite insular and remarkably arrogant. This led to a bit of a divide
where certain people believed that the Internet should be rewritten in
rails and others had a brain, but that seems to have settled now. The
rails community is still known for its zealotry, but they are
mitigated by an influx of software engineers which see the framework
as a tool rather than a life style.

Hotness:
I don't think rails is in the limelight anymore, which, as Lindsey
pointed out, is not a bad thing. If you really wanted the latest
hotness, you'd be using Cassandra, MongoDB, and Ajax-pages. You do
want to be webscale [1], don't you?

Rewrite:
In general, I think that rewriting from scratch tends to take more
time than modifying the existing code base to match. In this
situation, though, the original code set will not be changed while the
new set is written, which should cut down development time
tremendously. Also, it's remarkably difficult to integrate languages
efficiently, and until every language switches to the Parrot VM (hah!)
it's not going to get much easier.

It won't be easy, but if you are as interested in the project as you
appear to be, it will be fun.

CM Lubinski

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs

On Feb 25, 1:44 am, Ian Young <ian.greenl...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Anna Carey]

I'm willing to keep the repo (though I'm just as happy to give it to
someone else). I was thinking I'd give access to anyone who showed
interest (watched the repo on github), until I had a reason not to.
Can we just leave the issue tracker as is on the Google Code?

I've fought through the php installation, but I'm still not able to
get the current plans from the googlegroup svn up and running. I
suspect it has to do with my database being out of date. I get the
error "Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in
/Users/acarey/work/grinnellplans-read-only/inc/User.php on line 28" on
the login page. Could someone give me hand? I don't know too much
about php, but really I just want to get it up and running so that I
can play around with it while I write some rails code. If someone
could send/post MySQL dump of a recent development database, that
would be awesome.

Should we get together for a general strategy talk sometime? Perhaps
a conference call over skype next Sunday, March 6th at 1pm? My
approach so far, is -- do a straight translation, keeping behavior
nearly identical and only after that, start making enhancements. But,
I could easily be convinced to go about it differently. Also, I'm on
AIM(annaswims) all day at work.

Also, if anyone wants/needs help getting started with rails stuff,
just let me know. I'm happy to help.

Anna

[Ian Young]

On 2/25/11 11:27 AM, Anna Carey wrote:
> I'm willing to keep the repo (though I'm just as happy to give it to
> someone else). I was thinking I'd give access to anyone who showed
> interest (watched the repo on github), until I had a reason not to.
> Can we just leave the issue tracker as is on the Google Code?

Yes, for now at least the issue tracker can stay at Google Code.

> Should we get together for a general strategy talk sometime? Perhaps
> a conference call over skype next Sunday, March 6th at 1pm?

Sadly, I'm on vacation all that weekend. I'd be happy to do some other
time, though. This weekend, M-W evenings next week, or subsequent
weekends or weekday evenings.

> My approach so far, is -- do a straight translation, keeping behavior
> nearly identical and only after that, start making enhancements. But,
> I could easily be convinced to go about it differently. Also, I'm on
> AIM(annaswims) all day at work.

Fantastic, I had the exact same thing in mind. No new features until the
rewrite is finished (on the main branch, anyways; people are welcome to
fork and do whatever they want).

A little bit of flexibility is fine as far as reworking existing
features in a way that makes more sense. For example, there's no need to
reproduce the exact structure of all the preferences pages as long as we
offer the same options in the end.

Ian

[Lunders]

bah, i'll try to help with this, though i feel it will only stoke ian
young's ego. wonder if i still remember how to code...

[Cassie Sims]

Ooh... I've been shopping for a new side project, so count me in for
helping out when I've got the time.

[Christine Gerpheide]

Hellllooo there.

I'm admittedly not a hardcore plans user, but I just heard about this
rewrite from Tom Baldwin and would also be really interested in
helping out, as I too have been looking for a good side project
recently. I have also admittedly never used rails... but I have been
playing with (plain) Ruby a lot recently, and I promise I learn
quick :) I know PHP very well at this point, along with MVC and some
PHP frameworks we use at my work.

Has the general strategy talk already happened? I'd love to sit in on
that if I can,
Christine

[Ian Young]

On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 7:57 PM, Christine Gerpheide <cgerp...@gmail.com> wrote:

Has the general strategy talk already happened? I'd love to sit in on
that if I can,

I don't believe so -- I think I accidentally ruined it by going on vacation. Would sometime this weekend work for others? We could set a time and do it over IRC or Google PartyChat...

Ian

[Anna Carey]

I'd I'd be up for a strategy talk any time Sunday.

[Christine Gerpheide]

Assuming everyone's alright with me attending, I'm also free any time Sunday. (And for those that actually have schedules I'll also note that it's daylight savings.)

In addition to IRC/google chat, and largely because I have just bought a laptop with a mic/camera, I'm also open to webcam- and/or voice-enabled meetings :)

Christine

2011/3/11 Anna Carey <aca...@gmail.com>

[Cassie Sims]

Ian, how dare you go on vacation and screw everything up? haha

My Internet availability is going to be spotty this weekend, but if a planning meeting happens anytime Sunday and my boyfriend's building's wireless is not busted for once I would love to join in as well.

Christine, thanks for the DST heads up, I had NO IDEA that was this weekend.

Cassie

[Christine Gerpheide]

Well, I'll throw out a time: how about 8pm?

2011/3/11 Cassie Sims <cassi...@gmail.com>

[aca...@gmail.com]

8 pm cst soundsgood  to me.  I think voice would be nice, since many of us don't know eachother personally.

It'd be a good idea to invite people on the front page of plans.

Sent from my iPhone

[Ian Young]

8 CDT works for me.

If you guys want voice/video, it's up to you to find and set up a service that allows group chats and is easy to join. Should allow text chatting at the same time for anyone without a working mic. Teamspeak or similars might be an option.

If that doesn't work out, does anyone who wants to participate NOT have access to a Google account and chat client (either the one built into Gmail or an app like Pidgin)? We use PartyChat (http://partychapp.appspot.com/) at work and it's very easy and functional.

Ian

[Christine Gerpheide]

Would skype work? At least the latest versions in windows and mac have group video (and probably just voice) chat. Not sure about linux.

win:

https://support.skype.com/en-us/faq/FA10614/How-do-I-make-a-group-video-call?frompage=category

mac:

https://support.skype.com/en-us/faq/FA10801/How-can-I-make-a-group-video-call-in-Skype-5-0-for-Mac

2011/3/11 Ian Young <ian.gr...@gmail.com>

[Anna Carey]

I think skype is a great option. I've sent contact requests to
anybody who has sent an email in this thread with a skype account.
Otherwise, you can add me "aca...@gmail.com". I'll start adding
people to the call at 7:30 so we can get the kinks worked out
beforehand.

[Sam Tape]

Hey All,

I'd like to participate in this project, but I probably can't make it to this "meeting." Would it be possible for someone to take a few notes about what's discussed?

Thanks,
Sam

[Christine Gerpheide]

Ill take notes!

Also I spose those attending should make sure they have the group video/add ppl to chat option in their skype.

So far rsvp we have anna carey, ian young, christine gerpheide, and maybe cassie if her internet works, yeah?

Christine

[Shitanshu Aggarwal]

I am in.

Shitanshu Aggarwal

[Ian Lunderskov]

i'll try to listen in as well.

[Jordan Shkolnick]

I will be there.

Jordan

[Ian Atha]

I am in complete support of anything that makes Plans' technology
better. Cleaning up the immense amount of technical debt we have
accumulated over the years is key to improving and accelerating future
Plans developments.

I will attend tonight's meeting.

Providing a consistent, RESTful, JSONy, API to allow more innovations,
outside core Plans—it'd be super-nice to have.

[Lindsey Kuper]

I have plans (um, so to speak) tonight and won't be able to attend the
meeting, so I'll second the request for notes to be posted on this
list afterward. Thanks!

Lindsey

[GrinnellPlans]

Hi all,

I'm in full support of tech side changes, though I'd admit, I don't
have the slightest idea of what this stuff is. If anyone thinks having
a cs-inept admin around is valuable, I will re-arrange my schedule so
I can participate.

- [ghadirim]

--
The GrinnellPlans Administrators.

[Christine Gerpheide]

OK so now we have:

anna carey, ian young, christine gerpheide, and maybe cassie

Shitanshu, Ian Lunderskov, Jordan Schkolnik, Ian Atha.

If your skype username is not easily searchable, please send it to the list/to me or Anna Carey on skype or email. I am cgerpheide on skype.

Meeting, scheduled for 8pm central daylight savings time, will start in approx 7 min from now.

Christine

2011/3/13 GrinnellPlans <grinne...@gmail.com>

[Christine Gerpheide]

We just had our skype meeting, over skype voice chat (no video, which actually worked pretty well). I've added the meeting minutes on the github wiki here:

https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans/wiki/Meeting-Minutes

Feel free to edit if something's missing or inaccurate. 

One thing I'll re-mention here specifically is that Anna offered to do something like an intro to ruby on rails next Sunday at 11am (correct?), for those interested.

Enjoy,

Christine

2011/3/13 Christine Gerpheide <cgerp...@gmail.com>

[Anna Carey]

Here's what I wrote for the front page message:

As plans grows older and the codebase grows, it becomes more difficult
to maintain. Therefore, we are moving to rewrite plans on Ruby on
Rails. When the code is complete, the change should be barely
noticeable to the average user. Only after that point would we
consider additional features. We invite people who like CSS,
designers, UI folks, content writers, designers, programmers or
curious onlookers to participate. The primary means of communication
for the group is
http://groups.google.com/group/grinnellplans-development and the code
will be at https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans. On Sunday,
March 20th at 11am CTD we'll have a conference call on Skype to talk
people through the basics of getting involved and getting started with
Rails. If you'd like to participate in the call, please add
aca...@gmail.com as a contact on Skype. Notes from our first
"strategy talk" are available at
https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans/wiki . If you can't make
the call but sill want to participate, don't worry, just dig in and
start doing awesome work or send an email to the group.

[Christine Gerpheide]

Nice :)

I guess my only comment would be that at the moment it seems sort of like attending the 11am session is the next step, but I think it'd be more accurate to say the best steps for newcomers would be 1) join the mailing list, 2) read last weeks' notes, and then 3) IF you would like an intro to rails to attend the 11am session. I guess my point is to keep the 11am session focused on rails basics, and for ppl that just want info about how to participate to get them to do (1) and (2) first. Does that make sense? Feel free to disagree ;)

But anyway, it sounds great. Thanks :)

Christine

2011/3/14 Anna Carey <aca...@gmail.com>

[Anna Carey]

Sorry for the delayed response

I agree that the primary point of the call will be to get people
started with rails, but I'm just as interested in getting people to do
the work that I have no interest in doing, mostly design. I don't
want designers to get put off by things that they may have no
interest/knowledge of (ruby, rails, haml, git, SASS etc. ). I figured
I'd do a quick rundown of what we decided last week, if there was
anyone new, talk through how to get you development environment up and
running for the first time, then do some coding. I figured we could
talk through the coding of secrets, since I think it's relatively
simple and will give a fairly good demo of rails. Anybody who thinks
it's too much tech talk is free to bail at any point.

Since it hasn't been posted in the main page yet, I'll offer to do it
again in a month if there's more interest. I want to get going now,
though, because I tend to feel super-enthused at the beginning of
projects, then get bored.

[Ian Atha]

Didn't realize it was time sensitive. Will try to find Mona and post today. May edit to make more appropriate for general public.

[Grant Custer]

Hi everyone!

I am going to try and be on the Sunday call. I'm really interested in
learning rails, but I haven't done a great deal of coding beyond
creating custom wordpress themes, so I'm not sure how much I'll end up
being able to contribute on that end. I can definitely put together
some stylesheets sometime, though.

> >>> will be athttps://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans.  On Sunday,

> >>> March 20th at 11am CTD we'll have a conference call on Skype to talk
> >>> people through the basics of getting involved and getting started with
> >>> Rails.  If you'd like to participate in the call, please add
> >>> aca...@gmail.com as a contact on Skype. Notes from  our first
> >>> "strategy talk" are available at

> >>>https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans/wiki. If you can't make

> >>> the call but sill want to participate,  don't worry,  just dig in and
> >>> start doing awesome work or send an email to the group.
>
> >>> On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 10:44 PM, Christine Gerpheide
> >>> <cgerphe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> We just had our skype meeting, over skype voice chat (no video, which
> >>>> actually worked pretty well). I've added the meeting minutes on the
> >>>> github
> >>>> wiki here:
> >>>>https://github.com/annaswims/GrinnellPlans/wiki/Meeting-Minutes
> >>>> Feel free to edit if something's missing or inaccurate.
> >>>> One thing I'll re-mention here specifically is that Anna offered to do
> >>>> something like an intro to ruby on rails next Sunday at 11am (correct?),
> >>>> for
> >>>> those interested.
> >>>> Enjoy,
> >>>> Christine
>

> >>>> 2011/3/13 Christine Gerpheide <cgerphe...@gmail.com>

>
> >>>>> OK so now we have:
> >>>>> anna carey, ian young, christine gerpheide, and maybe cassie
> >>>>> Shitanshu, Ian Lunderskov, Jordan Schkolnik, Ian Atha.
> >>>>> If your skype username is not easily searchable, please send it to the
> >>>>> list/to me or Anna Carey on skype or email. I am cgerpheide on skype.
> >>>>> Meeting, scheduled for 8pm central daylight savings time, will start in
> >>>>> approx 7 min from now.
> >>>>> Christine
>

> >>>>> 2011/3/13 GrinnellPlans <grinnellpl...@gmail.com>

>
> >>>>>> Hi all,
>
> >>>>>> I'm in full support of tech side changes, though I'd admit, I don't
> >>>>>> have the slightest idea of what this stuff is. If anyone thinks having
> >>>>>> a cs-inept admin around is valuable, I will re-arrange my schedule so
> >>>>>> I can participate.
>
> >>>>>> - [ghadirim]
>
> >>>>>> On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 4:54 PM, Lindsey Kuper

> >>>>>> <lind...@rockstargirl.org>

> >>>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>> I have plans (um, so to speak) tonight and won't be able to attend
> >>>>>>> the
> >>>>>>> meeting, so I'll second the request for notes to be posted on this
> >>>>>>> list afterward.  Thanks!
>
> >>>>>>> Lindsey
>
> >>>>>>> On Sun, Mar 13, 2011 at 5:32 PM, Ian Atha <i...@atha.io> wrote:
> >>>>>>>> I am in complete support of anything that makes Plans' technology
> >>>>>>>> better. Cleaning up the immense amount of technical debt we have
> >>>>>>>> accumulated over the years is key to improving and accelerating
> >>>>>>>> future
> >>>>>>>> Plans developments.
>
> >>>>>>>> I will attend tonight's meeting.
>
> >>>>>>>> Providing a consistent, RESTful, JSONy, API to allow more
> >>>>>>>> innovations,
> >>>>>>>> outside core Plans—it'd be super-nice to have.
>

> >>>>>>>> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 21:47, Ian Young <ian.greenl...@gmail.com>

> ...
>
> read more »

[Anna Carey]

Good! Please try to install rails http://rubyonrails.org/download
and git http://git-scm.com/download before the call. If you have
trouble we can talk about it on the call, or fell free to send me an
email. Rails does a pretty good job of separating the view code from
all of the other stuff, so it'll be much easier to contribute to this
than php-plans.

[rmacd]

Hello all,

Just got on board here - only came across GP a couple of days ago and
I'm looking at putting together a modified version for use at my
University - it's lookin' pretty good so far. Had a couple of stumbles
so here's a bit of help:

On Feb 25, 8:27 pm, Anna Carey <aca...@gmail.com> wrote:
>  I've fought through the php installation, but I'm still not able to
> get the current plans from the googlegroup svn up and running.  I
> suspect it has to do with my database being out of date. I get the
> error "Notice: Trying to get property of non-object in
> /Users/acarey/work/grinnellplans-read-only/inc/User.php on line 28" on
> the login page.  Could someone give me hand?  I don't know too much
> about php, but really I just want to get it up and running so that I
> can play around with it while I write some rails code.  If someone
> could send/post MySQL dump of a recent development database, that
> would be awesome.

Your problem here is that you've got your warnings switched on -
including notices. Notices aren't errors, but are annoying all the
same.

Note that the current version of GP will override your php.ini
settings when in 'developer' mode, so you can switch off the notices
in ./Configuration.php (set 'ENVIRONMENT' to anything other than
'dev').

Updating your DB is as easy as ' $ php ./db/migrate.php'

Also, to chime in on the RoR side of things, I for one do not believe
porting over the tree to Rails is hugely necessary - sure, there are a
few things that need cleaned up in the current tree - but believe you
me, it won't be long 'til you're banging your head against a wall,
trying to break *out* of the 'set method' that RoR gives you. Been
there, done that. Ruby on Rails is great, as long as you do it "the
RoR way"...

-Ronald.