Thanks for the kind words. At the time when I first started working on the site, I definitely think I saved time. I'm a designer learning to be a developer, so five months ago I don't think I could have written something like this from scratch. Even still, while my confidence level has been boosted like crazy since then, I still definitely feel like it was a very good basis to start off on.
As far as some issues I ran into, the biggest point of confusion was how to modify the models without overwriting the pluginin's code to allow for easy updates. When I first started the project, I was retarded and kept overwriting them with little tiny tweaks. I eventually just made a new duplicate model in my own models folder for anything required changing. I remember seeing something in the FAQs or in the google group about a way to submodule the models, but I didn't get a chance to do that. So, now I'm going to have a hell of a time doing any updates to CE (such as the group functionality which I've been seeing some buzz around in the group). So, I definitely recommend people do the models the correct way. Another thing I overrode was the need to supply a birthday upon sign up as well as getting rid of the account activation stuff. To do that, I just removed the validation for the birthday in the user model, and made the create account action add the current time in to activated_at column for the user model (@user.activated_at = Time.now). A big area that I changed was the original focus in CE to have everything centered around blog posts. Our community is really centered around our art "projects" and the images that people upload to it. In fact, I have yet to actually implement the blog feature as I want to go in and really tweak it to allow users to connect blog posts with their project submissions or photo submissions or other items or assets (I'm thinking a polymorphic table that connects a post to an item). I created my own "events" functionality because the CE one was pretty limited. I needed events to have the option to "belong_to" a project, but also be on their own. I'm working on adding the ability for users to RSVP to events as well as upload pictures that they shot of the event. I changed the name of the photos functionality to "portfolio" and just made a few tiny tweaks. The most convenient little tip I had found was how to give a controller an alias in your routes by using the :as option. Then, you would call "photos" in your RESTful routes like normal, but the browser will see "portfolio" (example: user_photos_path (user) becomes: /user/portfolio) user.resources :photos, :as => 'portfolio' At our gallery, there's Steve and I who run everything along with two interns. Our interns are the main people who handle customer support and the shipping out of our "project materials" and orders, so I used CE's built in roles to sort out who can see what. In CE, the role ID of 2 is assigned to a moderator, but we used that to assign to our interns, while Steve and I get IDs of 1. I use these roles inside of the admin section I built for us to determine what our interns are allowed to see. I know there are a ton more areas that I modified that I will think of later. I'll keep posting more stuff as I think of it. If anyone has any specific questions about how I handled anything, please feel free to respond to this thread and I'll try to help you out. And again, I want to give you another huge thanks, Bruno, for making CE. Oh, and a congratulations on the baby! Shane On Feb 4, 4:21 pm, Bruno Bornsztein <[email protected]> wrote: > Wow. This is impressive... nice work! Noob? I think not. Looks like a very > well-skinned install of CE with lots of cool custom functionality. I (and > I'm sure others) would love to hear about some of the challenges/solutions > you encountered using CE for this project. Did you save time versus just > building from scratch? > > Thanks for sharing! > Bruno > > On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 11:26 AM, shiftshane <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hey Bruno and everyone else! > > > I want to thank you, Bruno, for taking the time to make such an > > excellent base for us to work off of. It still took forever (mostly > > because I'm kind of a n00b), but I finally rolled out our new site > > this week. I built a shopping cart in to it, extended the photo > > capabilities, added comments and tags to new models, etc. > > > I imported our old users, so we started strong with over 5,000 users, > > but it's so cool seeing everyone interact with eachother and comment > > on eachother's artwork when given that chance. > > > Thanks again, Bruno! > > >http://www.arthousecoop.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CommunityEngine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/communityengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
