[tobor]

I have a project starting up. About a 30 page site, 15 pages will be maintained by client in a CMS. Most of the those 15 pages that are managed by the CMS have basic fields 'title', 'copy' and file-upload.
I was hoping to do this project in RoR, mainly because the tutorials I've done have gone well and I think doing this project in Rails could potentially save us a lot of time. But having some feed-back on people who have launched RoR sites and if the project I mentioned sounds like a good first project, would really be helpful.

[proc355]

if you're not completely starting from scratch (as you say, you've done some tutorials) then go for it - you could have it fleshed out in a couple of hours.

the beauty of it is there are several existing cms available for you to dissect if you're up against the wall:

Radiant CMS
Rubricks - CMS on Rails
Railfrog - CMS Ridin’ on Rails / Ruby on Rails CMS

more for inspiration for solutions to particular problems than anything else - nothing stopping you hacking radiantcms to do what you want... though it's probably faster and easier to build your own

ideally invest in a couple of books:

Agile Web Development with Rails—Second Edition
Rails Recipes

the pdf's are like $20 - better for searching too

there are plugins for just about every functionality you'll require for a cms

there's a plethora of helpful people on the mailing list & irc.freenode.net#rubyonrails if you're banging your head - it's certainly the most helpful and non-judgemental community i've been fortunate to be a part of

one caveat - file uploads. rails is single threaded so uploads are blocking; there are however solutions to this, the best being merb - which is essentially threaded rails without the cruft (uses the same style of coding so it's not a paradigm jump); it's new, docs aren't comprehensive, there's less of the magic of rails so you'll have to think a bit, but i managed to pick it up enough in a couple of hours to build a little tumblelogging app in a few minutes so it's not difficult (if you have some rails knowledge; most issues i had were with getting existing rails plugins to work which wouldn't be an issue just for uploads)

you'll also have to think about deployment options, which is a topic in itself - there are providers, depends on your budget; if it's bottom end you'll have to roll your own.

hth

edit: and a merb tutorial

[tobor]

Wicked... I'm stoked!!!

[proc355]

ok, a little update for you:

if you're looking at merb, don't use the current gem, build it from source (uses rake); the directory structure has changed for the upcoming 0.4.0 release (imminent, i'm chatting with the creator on irc right now)

then you wont have to move all your files about, like me

[tobor]

Yeah, I'm running into a lot of problems just setting up a server to use Rails. Dispatch.fcgi runs around 20Megs in memory and lighttpd had a setting of max 5 to speed-up any rails request. It's recommended you don't run full production mode during development, but i just wanted to see how the environment reacted. Server stopped being able to execute any shell commands because no memory could be allocated (VPS with 256MB memory). This is the third serve we've tried. A lot of other servers that do support rails, only support early versions, which have some notable problems.

I'm going to save the rails development for another project, where we can get dedicated, and truly develop in our own environment.

[Transmogrify]

Originally Posted by tobor

Yeah, I'm running into a lot of problems just setting up a server to use Rails. Dispatch.fcgi runs around 20Megs in memory and lighttpd had a setting of max 5 to speed-up any rails request. It's recommended you don't run full production mode during development, but i just wanted to see how the environment reacted. Server stopped being able to execute any shell commands because no memory could be allocated (VPS with 256MB memory). This is the third serve we've tried. A lot of other servers that do support rails, only support early versions, which have some notable problems.

I'm going to save the rails development for another project, where we can get dedicated, and truly develop in our own environment.

I run rails applications on a 128MB VPS with 2 mongrel servers and apache 2.2. It runs plenty fast enough.

[Transmogrify]

Originally Posted by proc355

one caveat - file uploads. rails is single threaded so uploads are blocking; there are however solutions to this

What do you mean by "rails is single threaded so uploads are blocking"?

[proc355]

Originally Posted by tobor

Yeah, I'm running into a lot of problems just setting up a server to use Rails. Dispatch.fcgi runs around 20Megs in memory and lighttpd had a setting of max 5 to speed-up any rails request. It's recommended you don't run full production mode during development, but i just wanted to see how the environment reacted. Server stopped being able to execute any shell commands because no memory could be allocated (VPS with 256MB memory). This is the third serve we've tried. A lot of other servers that do support rails, only support early versions, which have some notable problems.

I'm going to save the rails development for another project, where we can get dedicated, and truly develop in our own environment.

pity, that's more than enough bang for a couple of mongrels etc.;could be a number of system things - if an extra 20-25mb is throwing a wobbly then you have other issues; that said, fcgi has again been consigned to the bin in favour of mongrel

Originally Posted by Transmogrify

What do you mean by "rails is single threaded so uploads are blocking"?

single threaded applications control concurrency by allowing the process to obtain a mutex lock - blocking all other requests until the process has finished; uploads take significant time (even if it's just a few seconds) which will block your entire application until the upload is complete

every request is affected the same way, it's just noticeable with long running processes

this leads to the scaling model of adding further rails processes - what you're doing by having a pack of two mongrels - in order to handle concurrent requests

think ive posted this link before but here it is again anyway Xen And The Art Of Rails Deployment » SlideShare