Hi Philip,
Thanks for the replies - it does give me more to think about… my
answers to your inline questions are inline
Phlip wrote:
Mohit S. wrote:
Hi, I have a design question that I’d like to get some inputs on.
Note that you can always change a design - especially with Rails - after
committing it. That’s what the “Agile” buzzword means on the books.
Of course I’m starting out with exactly that idea actually!
For internal use, I am creating a site for listing manuals.
Two questions: Have you identified your user community, and asked them
exactly what feature here is most important?
I’m basically dealing with developers - I’m trying to make something
like the PHP Manual (PHP: PHP Manual - Manual ) site for one of the
technologies that I follow. The idea is to have a central site for all
things related to the technology - with manuals & code samples, etc.
Hmm… a blog… I guess it is a bit like a blog or wiki or the manuals
site or something similar. I’m playing with the idea of having a
developer site where the developers can tag the pages and add community
content to the basic manual that is provided by the vendor.
Now, the first set of relationships is easy:
- manual has many api_pages
Are you sucking the manual itself into the website? If so, why not just
stuff PDFs into your /public folder?
Actually, my thought process was to have HTML versions of the PDF
manual. I didn’t plan to just have the PDF there…
base code.
I think I see what you mean - I should investigate that closer… I guess
this is a CMS of sorts and the Blog architecture might fit it very
well…
you could just point into a document using
http://my.private.server/docs/my_document.html#my_paragraph , right?
I’m sure there are many things that my post doesn’t make clear
I think the PHP manual site illustrates what I mean - there are no PDFs
but there is an HTML page which explains a certain concept/ API and
developers can add comments to it. Also, there are other sections of
the site that have other technical content (like articles or how-to
pages) and those have comments too. My question was more about how to
model comments across the site - should I just have one table for all
comments and figure out a way to see if the specific comment belongs to
an API definition or a technical article or something else… OR should I
have a separate table for each type of comment - so, I have
api_comments, tech_article_comments, etc.
But, I think your point about the blog makes things generally simpler.
Every thing is a post/ page and it can have one/ more comments in it.
Perhaps, if I combine it with acts_as_tree, that would give me the
parent/ child relationship that manuals → sections → pages should
have. Then, I should combine it with acts_as_versioned so that we have
a history of edits.
Am I thinking too much? What would your idea for this be?
One of the Rails samples out there for polymorphic data tables (/Rails
Recipes/?) starts with a “tumblelog”. You could try one of those to get
started.
I have Rails recipes and I’m going to look at that now!
Thanks,
Mohit.