thewebfellas - ruby on rails development specialists uk

I’m up in Leeds for a while and thought it would make a change from the London events to check out a few of the things going on up here in the North of the land.

I’ve just finished working on some code that makes use of Scott Rutherford’s FCKEditor plugin for Rails. It’s a great plugin that stops views from becoming cluttered with the extra code needed to get FCKEditor working.

I stumbled a bit though when I needed to use an editor that wasn’t tied to a model: there is no tag helper. A quick search turned up a request for such a helper but it doesn’t seem like anybody has actually written one. So here’s mine!

I’m currently working on tidying up our development environment and team collaboration tools. One part of this is to either write or reuse an existing package – at the moment we use Trac but this doesn’t seem to be in the spirit of Rails development!

On my list to evaluate are Collaboa, Retrospectiva (which I believe was branched from Collaboa), Redmine (which we’ve used before, albeit a while ago) and Devalot.

A common requirement of the tools that support reading from your SVN repository is to have the Ruby SVN bindings installed and working – a task that for some reason seems harder than it should be.

What follows is a little history around our name, and the problems it now causes us!

Every so often the subject of company names comes up. When you're starting a business, one of the first questions you try to find an answer to is 'What do we call ourselves?'.

I decided this morning that I’d take the time to put together a few of the patches for Mephisto that I wrote while creating this site. They’ve been tested with edge Mephisto (I grabbed revision 3037 from svn) and Rails 2.0 RC1. When I first tried to run the tests I got this error: alias_method: undefined method failure.message for class Spec::Watchers::Have (NoMethodError). This turned out to be an incompatibility between RSpec and Rails 2.0 and simply updating the RSpec plugins to their edge versions fixed the problem.

Over the weekend I was making the last few tweaks to the templates for our site so that we could finally go live. Everything was looking good until I added a few extra tags to an article: all of a sudden our tag cloud was overflowing.

One of the good things about the high level of activity in the Rails world is that very often if you don’t like the default way of doing things there are usually several alternatives. A good example is the choice of templating language: if you don’t like ERb (and I don’t as it smells too much like PHP) then you can use something else. I’m personally a HAML fan but the project I’m currently working on - adding new features to an existing site that was developed by another firm - uses Markaby.

I've spoken about it for a while and now it's here - our new improved website!

Rob's done a great job getting the site complete - the result is this sparkling new site that will feature much more input from us in terms of blogging and also releasing code to the community when we feel it is of use to others. We've done this with one of the Mephisto plugins we created for this site, and there is more to come.