Recap of a Rails Project

Back in 2000-something, the department of information technology at Åbo Akademi decided to build it’s homepages with Plone. Some years later it was discovered that it was becoming harder to implement the new features that were needed. The site was also perceived as slow.

Having been dabbling with Rails a bit before, I took upon me to build (and later replace the Plone-powered site) with what today has evolved into research.it.abo.fi as it is today.

In the original specifications we had on a high level (among other things):

• people
• projects
• publications

and

• easy administration of the above

Nothing fancy here actually – it’s just amazing that we didn’t have that back in the day.

I thought it couldn’t be that hard to implement something in Rails that would live up to those specs. And it wasn’t – in a couple of days I had an MVP.

During the years the application has got a couple of new features, and I’m now just going to list the gems behind them.

• Twitter Bootstrap
• ActiveAdmin
• HAML (haml-rails)
• jQuery
• ThinkingSphinx
• unicorn
• capistrano
• rspec
• capybara
• api_cache
• koala
• friendly_id
• devise
• cancan/cancancan
• chartkick
• rails_best_practices
• foreman
• sass-rails