Weekly Rails Tutor Update - Oct 30, 2009

[Carmen Ferrara]

Hi folks,

Douglas and I chatted a bit this week and brainstormed on some ideas
for RailsTutor. One of the main ideas that we came up with was to
move the existing site over to a new design and away from Redmine.

We feel that a redesign will provide many benefits - here are a few:

1) The existing site primarily consists of a single course called:
"Absolute Beginner's Guide to Ruby on Rails" - however, there is a lot
of content in this course covering a variety of topics.

If you take a look at the outline (http://railstutor.org/projects/
rails-tutor/wiki/Courseware_Outline), it's a bit unwieldy and may be
tough for a beginner to get started and navigate. Instead we'd like
to break our single monolithic course into smaller bite sized chunks.

For example we could have separate sections that contain articles
related to: HTML basics, Javascript basics, Rails concepts, Up and
Running with Rails, Advanced Rails topics, etc. Beginners could move
along at their own pace and dive into topics they needed help with.

2) The new site itself will be built with Rails (of course) and will
be hosted on github for all to contribute back to.

3) The new site will be an example of a "best practices" rails
application, and can evolve over time as Rails evolves.

4) A new site allows content admins to write articles that can be
based on the actual Railstutor "app". So for example, if someone
wanted to write a tutorial on "How to add Comments to your Rails
site". They could actually implement a "comments" feature for
Railstutor, as well as include the code into their article. We had
originally talked about this when we had the "BookClub" application,
but this allows us to improve the Railstutor and write relavant,
useful articles based on a real-world app.

We want to start with a very basic set of requirements. Essentially,
we'll have the following requirements:

- A simple, clean layout
- Basic user auth with an "admin" role (admins can create/edit/delete
Articles and Sections)
- Primary data models Users, Sections, Articles
- Views for displaying a Home page, Sections (and related Articles),
and Articles themselves

We realize that many other Rails CMS apps already exist - but the
point is that this can be a model for others to learn from and folks
can follow the progress of our little CMS as it grows with features.
What better way for someone new to learn?

In the coming weeks Douglas and I are going to begin putting the basic
shell of the new site together and migrating all the content over,
setting up existing content writers in the system - so let us know if
you'd be able to help out.

Let me know if you have any questions, thoughts, or comments at all.

Have a nice weekend.

Carmen-

[karmen_blake]

Awesome ideas! I would love to help where needed.

-Karmen

[Bryan Ash]

This sounds like a great idea.

I suggest lesson one should be "Specifying Application Behavior With
Cucumber"

Feature: Tutorial display
In order to learn Rails best practices
As a Rails developer
I want to view tutorials

Scenario: Tutorial content is visible
Given a tutorial on Cucumber exists with title "Specifying
Application Behavior With Cucumber" and body "Cucumber rocks!"
When I go to the Cucumber tutorial
Then I should see "Specifying Application Behavior With Cucumber"
And I should see "Cucumber rocks!"

-Bryan