Kuroko Project
symmetrical docking

Last Monday, the Rails pseudo-content-management-system that I’ve been working on for the past nine months went live at the Yakima Herald.com, replacing a 4-year old system that ezmobius designed as his first Rails project.

This one’s brand-spankin’ new: Rails 2.0 from the get-go, fairly proper REST(where possible), using a dedicated SQL database, adherence to clean design(again, where possible), and copious use of plugins.
(current favorites: has_finder, thinking_sphinx, acts_as_state_machine, will_paginate, and acl_system2).

Granted, there’s still holes, and I’m already working to fix some poor architectural assumptions I made four months ago, but the newsroom is breathing relief at not having to jump through server hoops anymore(which weren’t ezmobius’ fault so much as limitations of tech and budget at the time).

Now eagerly waiting to see if I merit one of the expected Internet replies:

• “Newspapers are no different than blogs! You’ve wasted your time reimplementing Mephisto! You’re dragging the rest of us Ruby folk down by not implementing something new that nobody’s ever seen yet!”
• “Man, Rails isn’t really cut out for building a CMS. Why didn’t you use Drupal or Django? Fail, dude, fail.”
• “Obviously your paper has money to throw away if they let you sit around for nine months instead of buying Ellington!
• “you use rails haha i could hav don it in a month with PHP u suk”

My human brain needs beer now.