We’ve decided to try something diferent and create a proof-of-concept remake of the MBNet platform to show how it can be improved and adapted for todays time.

MBNet is a portuguese service where you can create temporary virtual VISA cards with any amount of money you want. Yes, it’s very useful and important but the service isn’t updated since 2005.

So our objectives were:

• KISS!
• Adapt design for todays needs
• Better organization of information
• Make use of stored data about your payments.

We took care in simplifying some steps (like the payments pop-up) and improving the usefulness of the data that exists in the platform.

So now, you should be able to sort, filter and browse your data and use different visualization statistics.

Project is done in Ruby on Rails, Mysql and jQuery. HTML/CSS is done using the 960gs. All in 24 hours. Some things are not completely functional. It’s a proof-of-concept. ;)

You can view the project online at mbnet.heroku.com.

Here’s some screenshots:

BaseApp Orange is a fork from BaseApp in attempt to make it a more suitable backoffice and structure for my own projects but it might have something you like. It’s like I made a base for a cake and you take care of the filling. :P

Anyway, here’s the main changes:

• app was updated to Rails 2.3.4
• added New Relic Gem
• added inherited_resources plugin which enabled me to reduce a lot of code in the REST admin controllers
• cleaned up and improved admin theme and code
• improved admin generator according to inherited_resources. After creating your model run script/generate adminator model_name
• added iPhone style Checkboxes to admin theme. thanks to Thomas Reynolds.
• replaced FckEditor with TinyMCE. There should be a speed increase.

The code for the project can be found at BaseApp Orange Github page.

Here’s some images:

If you want to meet with fellow rubyists and share some insights, knowledge or simply have a nice coffee then join us at the Liberdade 229 space. If you want to take public transportation, you can take the 732, 727, 720 728 buses that stop nearby (you have to walk a bit but it’s good for you) or the leave at the Marques de Pombal subway station.

You can find more info about the event at the upcoming.org page.

The event was brought together in a very Barcamp-like style, informal but valuable, I guess. There’s some key points to be improved for next time but I think a very valuable step was put forward to atempt to bring people on the comunity together.

There was presentations on BDD, Cucumber, Performance on Rails (by me), Capistrano, lot’s of discussion on topics like IDE’s, deployment, testing and some interesting projects were also presented (like escolinhas.pt).

Looking forward for next time. :)

Adva-CMS

Adva-cms is an open source cms plattform based on Ruby on Rails and Rails Engines.

Radiant CMS

Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content management system designed for small teams.

Browser CMS

Browser CMS is a new-comer on the Rails community but promise to stir things up. Take a look at their video presentation.

And here’s 3 screenshots of each CMS in action:

First of all, you need to install the plugin on your project by doing:

script/plugin install git://github.com/thoughtbot/paperclip.git

from your project main directory. After this, usage is very simple.

Let’s imagine I have a user model and I want to have a avatar attribute to include a picture of the user and let’s say we want that avatar to be resized to 3 different sizes (120×120, 48×48 and 26×26). Paperclip does this using ImageMagick.

We’re first going to create a migration to hold all this information:

class AddAttachmentsAvatarToUser < ActiveRecord::Migration
  def self.up
    add_column :users, :avatar_file_name, :string
    add_column :users, :avatar_content_type, :string
    add_column :users, :avatar_file_size, :integer
    add_column :users, :avatar_updated_at, :datetime
  end

  def self.down
    remove_column :users, :avatar_updated_at
    remove_column :users, :avatar_file_name
    remove_column :users, :avatar_content_type
    remove_column :users, :avatar_file_size
  end
end

Then we define the attribute in the model:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
has_attached_file :avatar, :styles => { :large => "120x120>", :medium => "48x48>", :thumb => "26x26>" }
end

Here’s an example on how your form should be:

<% form_for :user, @user, :url => user_path, :html => { :multipart => true } do |form| %>
    <%= form.file_field :avatar %>
  <% end %>

Your controller doesn’t have to do anything specific to handle the avatar, just save the user as usual.

  def create
    @user = User.create( params[:user] )
  end

And finally, if you want to show the avatar in your view, here’s some examples:

  <%= image_tag @user.avatar.url %>
  <%= image_tag @user.avatar.url(:medium) %>
  <%= image_tag @user.avatar.url(:thumb) %>

That wasn’t very difficult. There’s some advance stuff you can do with Paperclip, like upload via a URL or upload your files to Amazon’s S3 or define post processing operations on your files.

So get creative and use it in your projects. :)

Update: The WebFellas have a very deep and interesting article about Paperclip, check it out.