eManagr News

I’m a believer in “credit where credit is due.” I’m also a non-believer in proprietary information. So, while we’re not releasing eManagr’s source code, I’d very much like to show off the technologies we’re using to make eManagr do its job, particularly since the overwhelming majority of tools are Open Source and are worthy of support. Apologies in advance to the non-technical.

First, the main system is programmed using Ruby on Rails. Ruby is nicely flexible and the Rails framework does a relatively nice job of hiding web-specific programming. The code is mostly custom, however, other than a few non-standard plugins such as Restful Authentication, WillPaginate (link is sometimes flaky), and auto_complete. The interface relies rather heavily on AJAX, by way of the Scriptaculous libraries.

Artwork, to the extent that we can call it that, happens in either Paint.NET or the GNU Image Manipulation Program, depending on the specific need. We still haven’t uploaded them at this writing, but the movies to be added to the system walkthrough are recorded using Wink; we discussed how to display them (or any Flash video) automatically at the correct size last week, which probably tipped off a few people that Ruby on Rails is involved.

One module not written in Ruby is the code that helps you invite your associates from social networking platforms and e-mail address books. This is handled with Open Inviter, with only slight modifications to match the site layout.

As most people will quickly identify, this blog runs on the WordPress engine, with the following plugins:

• Akismet filters out comment spam.
• The All-in-One SEO Pack is more important for cleaning up the interface than search engine results, but that aspect is also appreciated.
• Author Highlight makes it easier for a casual reader to find official responses to comments.
• Broken Link Checker decreases the likelihood that a link-heavy post like this will become useless to a future reader.
• Google XML Sitemaps help with the aforementioned search engine results, but also help to keep articles straight internally.
• I Love Social Bookmarking helps you, our readers, get the word out, should we happen to say anything useful.
• WordPress Mobile Edition is terrific for making this blog accessible on tiny devices. It’s a shame that the entire web can’t degrade this way automatically.
• WordPress Thread Comment lets you respond to someone’s comment directly, rather than trying to refer to the comment in absentia.
• WP-PageNavi definitely goes a long way to cleaning up the standard WordPress interface.
• Finally, WP Super Cache makes me feel like an idiot when I tweak a setting and it doesn’t show up, but the return in the form of speed makes it worthwhile; there’s nothing worse than a text-only page that loads slowly.

Finally, the community and support forum is the very nice Vanilla package. It’s not perfect, and we’re still (clearly) settling in, but it’s easy to use without sacrificing any significant features.

Oh, and for planning and managing development, we use some web-based system called eManagr. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.

Would anybody else running a software project like to talk about their setup? How is it working out for you?

Tags: Colophon, Credit, Development, Tools

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 12:00 and is filed under Development, Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.