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Nathaniel Quashie
4,376 PointsFor those that have completed the ruby on rails track....
I was wondering if anyone who has finished the Ruby on Rails track has gone on to build anything interesting?
I paused my membership a few months back and things have changed a bit around here. During my time away, I have been teaching myself Ruby and Python and i'll be starting the Ruby track with Treehouse. Again, I want to know if anyone has built anything interesting based on what they've learned from Treehouse - I am looking to build a blog for a friend of mine and I would like to do so using RoR.
7 Answers
Lorna Marlow
Courses Plus Student 15,701 PointsI have just created the first version of my website using a lot of what I have learnt on the Treehouse Ruby/Rails track. It has taken my quite a few months as it required me to actually understand what I was doing. I found that I was fine adapting tutorials until something went wrong. It has been very much one step forward and two steps back and took a lot longer than I ever imagined but I have learnt no end. here is the link if you are interested http://mystitching.herokuapp.com/ it is still very much a work in progress.
David Moore
13,916 PointsHey Nathaniel! I've got a couple side projects going that are half serious and half for me to learn certain gems like Kaminari for pagination, gmaps4rails / Geocoder for mapped locations, etc. but nothing I am ready to share with the world just yet.
I am in a similar position as you as I want to make a blog for myself to show a little of what I know and discuss the issues I encounter in Rails. I've been looking for a good overview of what all goes into a blog but so far I've only found very simplistic guides. Here is what I've came up with as far as necessities:
- Users/Admin - Devise
- User Roles (only if you want to have users for commenting) - Pundit
- Comments (In addition to your own users or as an alternative to Pundit) - Disqus_API (or just hack in it manually - I haven't played with this gem yet.)
- Pagination - Kaminari
- RSS - Here's a post I found that supposedly addresses setting up a RSS feed based on your Post object: http://techoctave.com/c7/posts/32-create-an-rss-feed-in-rails
- Images - Paperclip
- WYSIWYG Editor - TinyMCE-Rails
From there, really you just need your Post object (and comment if you are rolling your own comment system). If you are rolling your own comment system, keep in mind that you may want to comment on comments so that is going to complicate your comment object's ActiveRecord association and require a polymorphic association (If you are wanting to keep it easy, Disqus is looking sexier by the minute, huh?).
I think that covers most of the nuts and bolts. Now we just need some lipstick for the pig. Check out Startbootstrap.com and Wrapbootstrap.com for some options but keep in mind these tempaltes are rarely (never) a "Drop in and it works" solution, rather a shortcut to rolling your own full css skin.
That should about cover it, at least as far as I've thought it through. All this comes with the standard disclaimer that I've not completed this project so any or all of this may explode violently when combined. And as a last word, I would be remiss if I did not ask if this is for someone who isn't you and may possibly not be a centerpiece of your portfolio, why not just Wordpress it? Always remember the old adage "Just because we can, doesn't necessarily mean we should!"
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsI dont know anything about Ruby but i dont know if you know , you need to know server language too like PHP for a blog for him to log in , post etc..
As im learning from Team TreeHouse CSS i learned and im still learning new things and slowely i can build better stuff plus if you have any question how how to do something , just write on forum :) People will surely help you . I post thing on forum and i learned soo much , something that i was strugeling for months with forms labels etc.. here i just posted on forum and people helped me .
Try to do what you want to do so its a blog in your case and if you have any question i recomend you to ask it here , im sure you will find the answer .
Nathaniel Quashie
4,376 PointsWell, with Ruby + Rails I wouldn't need to learn PHP as both RoR and PHP are considered to be back-end languages that can complete websites. I do appreciate the advice you've provided and I'll most definitely will be utilizing the forums to help me as I move along.
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsForums are really great , especialy on Team TreeHouse , its better than Stack.. or any other site because here you chat live and you can ask just anything in a response of minutes :) I just realized that heres forum and i started to ask questions and i learned alot on here , before i did search on internet for hours, day, months .. horrible , and here i just can learn well , its just amazing using forums here . Keep beeing active in forum and you should get problem solved with the help of others and MOD too , including STAFF :) I hope i helped you . Coudnt tell much about Ruby on Rails because well im just sitting on HTML CSS and i guess sort of in JS .
Bdw do you recomend to learn PHP or Ruby on Rails before JS? would be the site enought dynamic and enought server power to make accounts like facebook? I dont know much about server languages what they can do and in what time its learnable
David Moore
13,916 PointsAurelian Spodarec: You asked "do you recomend to learn PHP or Ruby on Rails before JS?" Honestly, you are going to use JS and jQuery with pretty much any backend language if you plan to do full stack dev (i.e. front end stuff too). Should you learn it before? Probably but it is up to you.
I went deep into Ruby / Rails first with a smidge of JS, mostly outside of Treehouse. Now I find myself needing to call on JS all the time whether it's jQuery or AJAX so I am going back and brushing up as needs arise. Good news is that if you learn "programming" it's not a stretch to jump from one language to another. I will say that php to rails is not the same as you are going from a language to a framework. Laravel is to Rails as PHP is to Ruby. Hope that helps!
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsWhat i want to learn is to be able to make login, rehistration, own account for users with different authority etc..and be able to post like on fb you post news feeds . I just want to learn that from server language . But also be able to make my own gallery and everything in my style. So i gues thats in JS and other one . I want to be able to make a website like that e.g FB but maybe alot simpler and then dive in app developement and develop my skill there , but not forgeting Web coding and all that what i learned on web.
Do you think i should learn enought in 2 moths spending 3-5 h per day ? i really need to learn how to make websites this year and then in 2015 straight in i need to dive on C/C++ and that stuff and im quite sort in time. And well do you think this goals are real ? And I am going in the right way? I did HTML before and i canlayout pages but in html5 with fluid background not really , thought now im learning to style forms and a nice start to HTML5 because its quite like frustrating ? thats the right word i think because its like i need to re-learn layouts to make them fluid uh ;d
David Moore
13,916 PointsThis needs its own thread but for a short, sweet answer, nope. Totally unrealistic. First, you don't learn ruby, rails, javascript, jquery, etc. once and then you are done. New versions are always being released. You will spend most of your time keeping up with the few core technologies you focus on. You could use 2 months to get a feel for rails or javascript but to say you had "learned" it and could move on, no way.
And why C/C++? iOS dev? Game dev? Tech development is a team sport. Like making a movie, there is just too much going on for one person to do it all. I think you are much better off picking what speaks to you most and go deep in that area as opposed to dipping your toes in a ton of various technologies.
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsI just saw this now uh : / Well i mean by tech developement to make like games or systems like " Flappy Birds" or like kind of " Facebook APP" and something like that so it can go to the store . Because my idea is to make a website facebook-like , and then learn how to make apps like " Flappi Birds " Or " Facebook App Like " . I want to learn first web developement and when im finished , so i can do facebook-like webpage , then i want to spend time on it to make it better etc.. after the page is good , i want to get into app developement , Is this like suitable? i think thats the word?like realistic? well at the end , because im only 17 , i want to get job as a programmer in tech anyways because im more intrested do program things and well its just my prefference even if i never programmed thought i just see it nice and useful for my ideas etc.. if they are realistic in the way that we can make them.
David Curtis
11,301 PointsIf you learn Rails, you don't need PHP.
They have added a lot of Rails content recently. Welcome back and good luck!
BTW, building a blog w/ Rails is pretty easy. You should also check out jekyllrb if they don't need comments.
Nathaniel Quashie
4,376 PointsWow! First and foremost I want to thank you guys for answers. David that was a wickedly detailed breakdown of the elements required for a blog. I'll be looking through that link as well and finding out more information about those gems you've mentioned.
Yet, I wanted to know if anyone had taken specifically what they've learned through the Treehouse Ruby/Rails track and developed something of their own using fairly much strictly what they've learnt here - of course with sprinkles of information learned from books,blogs,articles etc..
I'll be going through the Ruby/Rails course and I want to know if others - whom have completed or nearly completed this track - have been able to use this information to build out ideas of their own.
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsIf you can , can you post some screenshots of your work? i want to see how your getting on with your blog .
Aurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsAurelian Spodarec
7,369 PointsYour website look nice