# Switching from acts\_as\_bewildered\_newbie to acts\_as\_newbie\_making\_progress - plugin suggestions **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [August 8, 2008, 4:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switching-from-acts-as-bewildered-newbie-to-acts-as-newbie-making-progress-plugin-suggestions/145377 "2008-08-08T16:10:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c89c15/32.png) [@dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dokpm0)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2008, 4:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switching-from-acts-as-bewildered-newbie-to-acts-as-newbie-making-progress-plugin-suggestions/145377/1 "2008-08-08T16:10:36Z")
Rails Fans, Forgive me if I ramble a bit. First, let me give a little history on my sites. Feel free to skip past it. Further down I’ll be detailing what I’m wanting to do and will be looking for suggestions on the best plugins, etc., to use. To make a long story, well, not quite so long - I currently act as webmaster for two web sites. One is my personal site, and the other is a local canine agility club’s site. The club’s site was originally a handful of static pages. When I took over as webmaster I knew absolutely nothing about web development, but started learning and eventually added some dynamic PHP based pages to the site. When I first started setting up my personal site I also went with PHP. It didn’t take long to decide that I didn’t like PHP. For quite a while now I’ve been spinning my wheels looking for alternatives. When I first came across Rails I loved it. I was hooked. That was somewhere around the time the first edition of Agile Web D. was on the shelves. I bought the book and before I could get through it, it was obsolete. Between that and other factors I decided to put Rails on the back burner for a while and explore other options. My main thing I felt was wrong with Rails was that it was evolving so fast documentation couldn’t keep up. I’ve checked out many other options - a few Java based frameworks - those were horrid, a couple of Python frameworks such as TurboGears and Django, etc., etc. The Python frameworks are nice, but I’m not entirely sold on Python yet. So, recently I decided to come and take another look at Rails. On the agility club’s web site, which I recently converted from PHP to [ASP.NET](http://ASP.NET) via Mono and then to Django, the Upcoming Events, Brags, and Photo Gallery pages are dynamic: [http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/Events/Upcoming/](http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/Events/Upcoming/) [http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/WAG/Brags/](http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/WAG/Brags/) [http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/Photo/Albums/](http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/Photo/Albums/) Everything else is currently still static pages. The above should be trivial to convert to Rails, but I could use some suggestions on the best plugins and/or image tools to use for the photo gallery. Currently the gallery is fairly simple. At some point I want to convert the members page: [http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/WAG/Members/](http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org/WAG/Members/) into a dynamic page and give club members the ability to log in and do things such as manage info on their dogs, add upcoming events, etc., etc. Currently I do all that myself. And, believe it or not, I currently manage the upcoming events and brags info via a TUI Clipper based program. After adding/editing events or brags, I run a program that extracts the data from the dBase style database and feeds it into psql to update the PostgreSQL tables. I would envision some day giving club members the ability to add biographical info on their dogs and perhaps create “virtual” photo albums for their dogs containing photos of their dogs that are in other albums. I would probably want a way to rearrange the order of photos, which in the above envisioned setup might belong to multiple “albums”. Would the acts\_as\_habtm\_list be the plugin of choice to achieve this? There are other areas, such as the links page, class schedules page, class student documents page, etc., that would benefit from a dynamic setup. Is there by chance a plugin that can convert uploaded Microsoft Word documents into PDFs? I’d love to give our training director the ability to upload student documents, but she says she can’t produce PDFs herself. And I really don’t want to have Word documents on the site. Since I’d want to control what members can add/edit, which authorization plugin would be the best choice? Some “admin” members might have access to edit anything while other members might only be able to edit their personal info, photo albums they created, etc. On my personal web site: [http://www.RawFedDogs.net](http://www.RawFedDogs.net) most pages are dynamic, and most would be trivial to convert to Rails. The site is currently a mixture of PHP and PSP(Pascal Server Pages). Once agin it’s the photo gallery I’m most unsure about. It would definitely benefit from a complete overhaul. Currently photos can belong to one album and any number of recipes and/or terms. Some albums are “hidden” and are only used to contains photos that are displayed via recipes or terms. The admin interface is pathetic. In my defense, I was learning PHP as I went. Adding photos currently goes something like this: 1. Upload photos to an upload directory via ftp. 2. Run a PHP script that mangles the file names to avoid naming conflicts, moves the photos to the originals directory, creates normal and thumbnail sized photos in those respective directories via ImageMagick command line utilities, and adds the photo’s info to the database. If any part of that process fails, I usually have to edit the database by hand to back out the changes. 3. I then open the “process uploaded photos” PHP page which searches through the database for photos that have no album ID assigned. It displays the photos one at a time so I can assign the photo to an album, add a caption, and optionally assign the photo to one or more recipes and/or terms. 4. Once the above is done if I want to make any changes such as changing the caption or rearranging the order the photos are displayed in, I do it by hand editing the database either via the command line interactive SQL interpreter or via something like phpMyAdmin. It would be wonderful to have a proper admin interface with a few bells and whistles such as drag and drop sorting, etc. Any suggestions are welcomed. Thanks, Kevin ---
**Author:** ![dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c89c15/32.png) [@dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dokpm0)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2008, 5:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switching-from-acts-as-bewildered-newbie-to-acts-as-newbie-making-progress-plugin-suggestions/145377/2 "2008-08-08T17:16:12Z")
Hi Kevin, dokpm0 wrote: > Further down I’ll be detailing what I’m wanting to do > and will be looking for suggestions on the best > plugins, etc., to use. > When I first came across Rails I loved it. I was hooked. Welcome aboard! > That was somewhere around the time the first edition of > Agile Web D. was on the shelves. I bought the > book and before I could get through it, it was obsolete. I don’t think I’d call it ‘obsolete’. Rails 2.x does not make Rails 1.x obsolete, IMHO. It makes it an option. You should look hard at the features added with 2.x and see if you need those features. My guess is the answer, in your case, will probably be ‘not really.’ > So, recently I decided to come and take another look at Rails. > > Any suggestions are welcomed. I’d suggest starting with Rails 1.2.x, going back to the book you’ve got (or maybe picking up the 2nd edition) and work through it. There are lots of tutorials out there for 1.2.x that haven’t been updated for 2.x (mine included). There are also plugins, including some you may find useful, that haven’t been updated to work with 2.x. The tutorial in AWDWR covers the stuff you’ll need for the admin / member login functionality you’ll need. There are several plugins for image upload. I don’t know of a Ruby library for converting Word docs to PDF, but Google turns up a substantial number of converters. The ones I looked at were free trial / low cost to purchase. Again, welcome. Best regards, Bill ---
**Author:** ![dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/c89c15/32.png) [@dokpm0](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/dokpm0)\ **Post date:** [August 8, 2008, 5:37pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/switching-from-acts-as-bewildered-newbie-to-acts-as-newbie-making-progress-plugin-suggestions/145377/3 "2008-08-08T17:37:21Z")
Bill, Thanks for the tips. On Fri, 8 Aug 2008, Bill W. wrote: > I don’t think I’d call it ‘obsolete’. Rails 2.x does not make Rails 1.x > obsolete, IMHO. It makes it an option. I was meaning that the first edition of AWDWR became, at least partially, obsolete because of the changes in Rails. Yes, continuing to use an older version of Rails is an option. But if starting a new project, it makes more sense to use the current version. > I’d suggest starting with Rails 1.2.x, going back to the book you’ve got (or > maybe picking up the 2nd edition) and work through it. There are lots of > tutorials out there for 1.2.x that haven’t been updated for 2.x (mine > included). There are also plugins, including some you may find useful, that > haven’t been updated to work with 2.x. I probably should have mentioned that since I’ve started taking another look at Rails I’ve purchased the beta third edition of AWDWR and also the current(aka covers Rails 2.x) edition of The Rails Way. I’d prefer to go with Rails 2.x from the start instead of starting with 1.x and upgrading later. Kevin [http://www.RawFedDogs.net](http://www.RawFedDogs.net) [http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org](http://www.WacoAgilityGroup.org) Bruceville, TX Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes. Longum iter est per praecepta, breve et efficax per exempla!!!