Apr 28

Custom layouts

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 4-28-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Layouts

One of the good things about using Ruby on Rails is that you can setup a basic site layout and it will automatically be applied to every page on the site. If you’ve ever worked on a site that didn’t use layouts, then you know what a timesaver this can be. Rather than having to modify every single page when you want to make a change to the header for example, you make one change in the layout file, and all the pages on your site will now use the updated header. There may be times when you want to disregard the default layout or use a different one entirely, such as when the user wants to print something and wants their information without all the extraneous elements like the header, footer, or navigation sidebar. Continue reading »

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Apr 14

Some useful links

By Adam Uncategorized No Comments »

In lieu of a tutorial this week, I thought I’d come up with a list of the resources I use when working on my Rails projects. There are several pages that I find myself going back to so frequently that I wanted to have them all saved in one place to find them easily. I’d recommend going over all the guides that are linked there to learn about all the different parts that make up a Rails project.

Useful Rails Resources

I put a permalink in the menu bar at the top of the page, so you can click it on any page to go to the list of resources and find a guide or tutorial to help with whatever problem you may be up against. I’ll update this page whenever I find new links to sites that I find to be useful in learning or working with Rails.

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Mar 31

Counting characters in a text area

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 3-31-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Counting with Javascript

It’s common in Rails apps that take input to use text areas to enter large blocks of text. It’s also common to have a limit on the amount of text that can be entered to ensure the database doesn’t get filled with pointlessly long posts or comments. It’s easy to put a validation in a model to limit the amount of text that can be entered, but it’s nice to give feedback in the view to show how much of the limit the user has already used. Continue reading »

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Mar 17

Setting up a staging server

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 3-17-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Staging server

When creating and deploying web apps with Rails, it’s a good idea to have a staging server that is identical to the production server where you can test out changes before making them live. That way you can test out the application in an environment that will be like what your users will be using but without making changes to the live application or its database. I’ll be setting up a staging server on Heroku to show the changes you’ll need to make to your Rails project to get it up and working. Continue reading »

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Mar 03

Adding pagination to a view

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 3-3-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Pagination

It’s common on web sites to have large numbers of records in the database. It’s not always useful to see all the items in the database at the same time as it could take a long time to load and involve a lot of scrolling to find the information we want. This is where pagination can be used as a helpful way to divide a set of results into chunks that are easier to use. A good example of pagination that is familiar to any web user is the set of links at the bottom of the page of search engines like Google. It has links to go to the next and previous pages and information about how many pages there are to look through. Continue reading »

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Feb 17

Tagging

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 2-17-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Tags

One common element used by web sites is the tag. Blogs make extensive use of them, and on this blog you can find the list of tags associated with each post and a tag cloud in the toolbar on the right to see a list of all tags and how often they are used. In this tutorial, we’re going to look at a popular gem for adding tags to a model. Continue reading »

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Feb 03

Testing Models with RSpec

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 2-3-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

RSpec

In my last tutorial I demonstrated how to setup tests for a model using the testing framework included with Rails. In this tutorial, I want to try out a different testing framework called RSpec to see how it compares to what we did before. RSpec is one of the most popular ways to test Rails apps, so if you work with Rails, you’re bound to run into projects that use it for testing. Continue reading »

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Jan 20

Testing Models

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 1-20-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Testing

One common task that developers should do when working on a project is to create tests that can be run to ensure that when we add new functionality to the project that it won’t break things that already exist. Rails already has a comprehensive test structure built in, and there are a ton of other resources that other developers have created to make testing easier. In this tutorial, I’m going to create tests for a basic User model using Rails’ test framework. Continue reading »

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Jan 06

Customizing CKEditor

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 1-6-2014

Rails version: 4.0.0

Custom interface

One of my previous tutorials showed how to install and use CKEditor to give all textareas a graphical user interface. We only scratched the surface of what it’s possible to do with CKEditor, so I’m going to return to the subject and show how to customize the user interface. Continue reading »

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Dec 23

Enumeration in Rails

By Adam Tutorial No Comments »

Date published: 12-23-2013

Rails version: 4.0.0

Enumeration

One tool that programmers use fairly often to store information is the enumeration. It’s most often used to store the state of objects in the model so the program knows how to interpret other data in that model. As common as enumerations are, it’s surprising that Rails doesn’t have a standard for handling it. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to create an enumeration that follows Rails conventions and symbols. Continue reading »

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