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Ruby

Posted by Zac Cohen
Zac Cohen
1,431 Points

Trying to create a HackerNews clone in Rails

I went through the "Building a Simple Rails App" to build the Treebook app. I'd like to build something similar, a HN clone with votes, threaded comments, users, points, etc.

I wasn't sure how to set up the scaffolding because I wanted to have "submit a link" and "submit a text post" .. do I just create 2 different scaffolds?

I was also wondering if it's possible to add an RSS Feed into the site.. I found "Feedzirra", but I wasn't sure if this is the best option. I want to scrape the RSS feeds links to embed YouTube vids, etc. as posts similar to Reddit.

I'd also like to add user ranks like Admin/Moderator/User maybe with private messaging, moderator messaging, etc. with the option to customize your avatar by your name.

Rails seems like a good choice to build something like this, but I'm still new to it. Thanks for reading.

I also was wondering if I should use Rails 4 or if I should stick on Rails 3 for now..

1 Answer

Steve Christie
Steve Christie
9,509 Points
Steve Christie
Steve Christie
9,509 Points

Zac, rails is a great option for a project like this. At this point rails 3 or 4 both work. Since it sounds like you are more interested in growing your knowledge base. I would go with rails 3.2.13. I believe most of the rails projects on Treehouse are in rails 3. So this should make the learning process easier as you will have something to refer back to. I would also recommend not relying on the scaffolds. Scaffolds can make building an application easier, but I found it helpful to build my models, controllers, views, routes etc. separately to help me better under how the rails frameworks operates.

Zac Cohen
Zac Cohen
1,431 Points

Thanks for the reply.

I don't fully understand models and controllers still. I'm a frontend designer who primarily designs WordPress themes from scratch. I'm trying to learn the backend of things now. Definitely going to look into building it separately to try to gain more knowledge about the operation first.