# Just a couple questions on how I should go about this

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 24, 2006, 1:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612 "2006-04-24T01:40:16Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hazmatt)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 1:40am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612/1 "2006-04-24T01:40:16Z")

</div>

I’m working on my personal site. The design is complete and I want to  
integrate some rails into it. I’ve done a few small things before, but  
compared to them this is big.

I need a simple blog with categories and comments and an archive. I want  
a  
nice posting system, but don’t want it in HTML. Is there something I can  
add  
or make, kind of like BBCODE?

I pretty much know what else I have to do, but there is one more thing.  
A  
client section. I want clients to be able to login and view things I’ve  
submitted and be able to comment back. A rudimentery forum. If there  
were a  
[http://clients.whatever.com/zigzag](http://clients.whatever.com/zigzag) I’d want to be able to say only THIS  
user  
and THAT user can look at /zigzag and comment/add things. Any idea how I  
should go about it?

I’m not looking for exact code, but just something to help me get  
started.  
I’m still fairly new to rails, but I think this will be a nice project  
to  
get me up to speed.

Cheers

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hazmatt)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 1:52am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612/2 "2006-04-24T01:52:28Z")

</div>

It sounds like you should investigate one of the role-based  
authentication solutions for Rails. I’ve used ActiveRBAC in the past,  
and it’s worked well; however, there are others, or you can roll your  
own fairly easily.

The basic idea is that you give one or more roles to all of your users  
(e.g. “editor”, “commenter”, “admin”, …), and they you assign  
permissions to do specific things (e.g. add a comment, restart the  
system, add a topic, erase a comment) to those roles. It’s a lot  
easier doing things that way than trying to manage things on a  
person-by-person basis.

Regards

Dave M.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hazmatt)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 2:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612/3 "2006-04-24T02:07:49Z")

</div>

I think I need to do it by person, or else people would have access to  
any  
project and could comment them, and that’s not what I want. I want it to  
be  
a place where we (client and myself) can talk privately about what’s  
going  
on and keep up to date.

Also, is there an easy way to email when something new is commented on  
in  
the client section? I’d also like the ability to send out a text message  
to  
myself or the client when things are updated. Is that possible?

Thanks a lot 🙂

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/b2d939/32.png) [@hazmatt](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/hazmatt)\
**Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 2:22am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/just-a-couple-questions-on-how-i-should-go-about-this/58612/4 "2006-04-24T02:22:54Z")

</div>

Consider using RSS instead of email as a simple way of notifying your  
users when an update is performed. It’s very simple to implement, and  
well covered in the “Rails Recipes” book if you need a reference.

If RSS isn’t an option, then you can used the created\_at and  
updated\_at fields in your tables as a reference point. If you create  
these fields in each of your tables as date/time fields, then Rails  
will automatically populate them for you when data changes in those  
records.

Using this, you could create a cron job to walk through your database  
every e.g. 5 minutes, select any records with the updated\_at field \< 5  
minutes old, and send out appropriate email messages. Not particuarly  
difficult to set up, but a fair bit more painful to test and monitor  
once it’s in production.

As far as role-based authentication goes, there’s nothing stopping you  
building a system whereby a user could be an “editor” for project A,  
and a “read-only” for project B. You’d probablyh have to create a  
3-way join table defined like this:

- id (primary key)
- user\_id (reference into your users table)
- role\_id (reference into your roles table)
- project\_id (reference into your projects table)  
and use it to track the user\<-\>role\<-\>project linkage, but that isn’t  
a difficult thing to implement.

I would still look at employing a role-based model for this if at all  
possible - unless your site is extremely small, I think maintaining an  
individual-based access model will be too painful in the long term.

Regards

Dave M.