David Lowry

I’ve just signed up to Haystack which is a new web designer finder service from 37signals. They make some pretty useful apps for running a small team business.

My [single item, cos i'm not paying!] portfolio is located here. Check it out!

The last few days I’ve been putting the finishing touches to the CMS behind Harry Ferguson Memorial.com. Initially completely in hand-coded HTML (to get it looking right without distracting myself hacking around in a CMS template styling system), it was time to choose a CMS to allow a certain amount of user updating to be done on the site.

I first experienced the Textpattern CMS through my participation in the TextDrive Joyent Mixed Grill “Venture Capitalist” life-time subscription. I was initially baffled by it’s usage of ‘forms’ ‘pages’ and ’sections’ to categorise different design and structural hierarchy. Mostly using WordPress over the last few years on various sites and most recently developing a custom Rails CMS for the upcoming Bible Society of Northern Ireland website (note: current site is *not* of my creation) (launching in the next few weeks) I decided I needed to hunt around a bit. A quick play with Drupal left me unimpressed, I wasn’t going to touch Joomla (is it just me or does every site that uses it scream “look, it’s a site built using Joomla!”) and so I thought I’d take Textpattern out for another try.

Impressed by the fact it’s finally had an update (version 4.2.0 was released just a week ago (28th August) — after, I believe, a long hiatus — time to give it a spin once more.

Installation is pretty simple, quite lightweight; doesn’t require much in the way of configuration if you have a bog standard *AMP setup, just create or associate the database you wish to use (you can use a ‘_txp’ style suffix to append onto your existing DB) and create the .htaccess requested – it’s all explained on the linked instruction page.

I’m not going to do any sort of tutorial on the installation process, that’s been covered so many times, by so many people, I’d only do it a disservice. However, I have been using the YAB_Shop plugin, which is seriously lacking in documentation, with a 27 page forum post over at Textpattern.org. I’ll be putting together a few thoughts and instructions (which I found difficult to find) on the e-commerce plugin in the next few days and hopefully that’ll help someone out (and help me process and learn further!).

—-

Edit: I realise I didn’t really ‘review’ the experience, which I intend to do more so when I write about the plugin, most of my gripes are with the plugin workflow!

It’s happened to me twice in the last couple of weeks, and this time I knew exactly what I’d done, so here’s the solution if you make the same bad and non-”Rails Way” mistake I did.

dave@infinity:~/$ rake RAILS_ENV=production db:schema:load
(in /apps/special)
rake aborted!

(See full trace by running task with --trace)


In my routes.rb file I had specified a route as such:
# map.connect 'special-day', :controller => 'pages', :action=>'show',
:id=>Page.find_by_title("Special Day").id

DON’T DO THIS. Not sure in what way it struck me as an overly good idea, but just don’t.
Strip that route out of your code and if necessary replace it as such:

# map.connect 'special-day', :controller => 'pages', :action=>'special-day'

What threw me about this problem is that I thought there was an issue in my schema.rb or migrations, this isn’t the case: ‘rake’ is trying to load the environment and falls over because ‘Pages’ hasn’t got going yet.

Don’t forget when you’re finished you may need to re-setup and migrate (cap deploy:setup / cap deploy:migrations) before your site will go.

P.S. This (silliness) never went into production!

I’ve had huge amounts of pain getting WordPress set up locally over the last few weeks on my old machine and when it struck again with my new development environment it definitely time to write down the required steps to get a great LAMP/Rails setup prepared (for me)!

Leopard has PHP and Apache fairly up to date, and probably MySQL as well, but I decided to get MySQL up to scratch using the Universal Binary along with a few command line instructions available here (guide and links to downloads).

I didn’t use this script myself, and at a year old it may have a few imperfections, but HiveLogic have a fairly well rounded Ruby/Rails install going on.

Finally, Wordpress to go on your LAMP stack will be a lot less painful using this guide for Tech Recipes.

Any suggestions additions or replacements for this list? Drop a comment!

I have six draft posts in the wings waiting to be pushed out, works in progress related to technologies I’ve been working with lately for Contrast.ie

Working on a still-hush-hush project with the lads best known for their rock star company photo and probably this week for their choice of marketing for Exceptional, the bug tracking tool for Rails (and more) at Railsconf in Las Vegas.

Part of the reason there’s been so little going on here is that I’ve been… well… rather busy. Trying to get client work done as well as freelancing with Contrast has been a bit of a struggle and I’ve just spent three days getting my brand new 24″ iMac set up and running… a pain worth the endurance, though I’m fairly certain I now need a bigger desk!

So, some posts about Rails, HAML, Cucumber, and possibly a very very late review of FOWA Dublin which never quite got finished coming up in the next few weeks.

Read the peculiar story of a BBC journalist who unknowingly betrayed the confidence of an island secret 25 years ago.

Things which piqued my interested: the islands use words like “ganzeys” for jumpers/jerseys/pullovers which my mother uses but not many others I’ve ever met; and the fact that during the War the island was officially classified as a ship called “HMS Atlantic Isle.” Which is pretty cool!

Good news.

As of 1st March 2009 the Student Loans Company released some beautiful information:

The new rate for income based student loans is 1.5% from 6 March until further notice. Interest is applied to loans from the date they are paid to you until they are repaid in full.

Dear Mister Government sponsored money lending money company: I apologise for venting that you were a big hypocrite.

Infinity21.net has just launched the first stage of the new website for Dromore-based Audio Visual Solutions Company, “Box 42″.

Andrew “Barney” Ferguson’s company can provide corporate AV solutions, dry hire or installation services. Need to hire a (new) van load of Plasma/LCDs or Wide Angle, Short throw, high lumens projectors? Check it out.

I’ve been working with Rails now for about 2-3 years on and off, for the last two months almost full time working on a project that I’m not talking about yet.
Via the great bunch of fellas at Contrast.ie I came across this article from Smashing Magazine on Rails which provides a great overview on a couple of things which I have picked up along the way and thought WOW that’s useful. They’re all here in one place.

Check out: Smashing Magazine: Ruby on Rails Tips

There’s a nice plug for Contrast’s current-big-thing web app: GetExceptional.

There appears to be something going on with Gmail’s SMTP ports since the issues they had at the start of the week. How does Gmail going down make BBC Lunch time news?
Ref: Blogoscoped forum article
This link solved the problem for me. Some GMail help articles state you should use port 25 or 465. As previously discussed O2/Be broadband in the UK doesn’t let you use Port 25 for anything other than O2 Email. I was using 465 which is Secure SMTP (with SSL). However, GMail now (appears to) require port 587: Message Submission (with TLS).

Peasy.

— update
Experiment with turning off your SSL setting as well!