[lug] Help with the BLUG website - volunteers wanted!

[Chris]

If any of you have (or want!) some Ruby on Rails skills, I have a
project for you: the BLUG website.

Rather than keep progress slow by doing it all myself, I'm sure some
volunteers could speed things up quite a bit and give us something
worthy of being actually being online.  Whether you can do ruby,
rails, or just plain HTML and CSS, you can help.

Download the site here:  http://lug.boulder.co.us/blugrails.tar.gz

All the code's in revision control with git, so you'll want to
download it if you don't already have it handy: http://git.or.cz/ And
if someone can tell me how to make it so you can just do a 'git pull'
from somewhere in lug.boulder.co.us, please let me know.

First of all, because I'm making the whole system public, and it's
silly to show one's passwords in public, rails won't be able to
connect to your postgres database until you set the BLUGPASS
environment variable to the password you've set so that you can
connect to your database without needing to update (or fix, if you've
done a git pull) your config/database.yml file.

You'll find that there's no views yet, which means there's nothing to
"see" exactly, but that's because I've been working from the bottom
up.  The most useful thing I've done so far is to get a bit of code
I've used for a long time for calculating when the next BLUG meeting
is, in lib/nextmtg.rb

The scripts I've been using for a while are in the file that you now
find in db/speakers.yaml for all the information needed to generate
the HTML pages for the current site.  I've made what I think is a
decent database schema in db/schema.sql, appropriate changes are still
welcome.

My current work is focused on creating an initial set of data
migrations for loading the existing data into new tables.  I'm doing
that by transforming speakers.yaml into other yaml files (see
script/create-fixtures-from-old-data.rb for an example), moving them
to db/migrate/dev_data/, and then using a trick I read about in the
Rails Recipes book to initialize the database from fixtures: see
db/migrate/020_load_data.rb

That's where it sits, so far.  I won't be doing much on it until after
my wedding, which is on August 5th.

Feel free to send me patches, though.  Please run 'rake tmp:clear' and
'rake log:clear' before doing so, so that we won't have huge amounts
of debugging stuff filling up the repository.

--
epistemological humility
   - Chris Riddoch -