Mat Harvard

I'm not sure what really happened, but the last time I wrote here was back in February. Back then I just started work on a website for a local garden center, Scent-Sational Plants, which has been launched, though it's not fully operational; archiving and photographing every single plant one owns takes some time, so that part of the site is inaccessible for now. The other project I had going at the time was a tumblelog. Everything worked fine, or would have with a little more time, but I just decided to put it on hold. One reason for doing so was the lack of a proper design, and also the pending release of Rails 2.3.

In the meantime I've kept my self... occupied. Everything seems to get more intense as the end of term nears, and being my graduation year makes it even more tiresome (but awesome!). It's only recently that I've found some time to play around in Rails again, and update my website at the same time. The new design is barely worth mentioning, even though it was the first piece I finished. The star of the show is the fresh application running everything. Doing a full re-write was never my original plan; however, it was well worth it. I went all out this time, that means a full admin panel complete with a custom design and lots of nifty widgets.

What's Missing

It may seem a little sparse right now, that's because some pieces haven't yet made it to the public side of the website. Those include categorized posts, multiple authors and a curious comment system. All of which are fully functional, and will slowly be added in due time. The only thing that makes the comments, "curious", is that it's now polymorphic. Which will allow me, one day, to extend it's scope into other parts of the site, say a photo gallery or back-end multi-author editing with criticism comments thing.

What's New

Here are a few screenshots of the admin panel. It's pretty modular, so the basic design from these pages carries into everything else.

The Dashboard

A list of recent activity around the site. It's just done by a global observer on all saves, updates and deletes.

Post List

Lists all posts and basic information about them. The same design is used for categories and users, just different columns.

Publish Page

A post has a summary, body and extended field, which make up the content of the post. I can select multiple categories, or set the publish date in the future, or even set a custom permalink (I've kept the id-post-title format so as not to break too many links, Update: Changed to just permalink).

That's all there is to it for now. Eventually I'll add some more features, such as automatic comment expiration, or post drafts/revisions. For now, it does just what I need.