The rest of this series can be found here.

Made it the rest of the way through the introductory tutorial today.

MVC (model-view-controller) is a neat concept once you get your head around it—the separation of logic vs. data is much stronger than most hand-coded HTML/PHP or WP templates achieve.

Turns out I didn’t need that link to the article from the index page, as it was part of the documentation only one step later…but I often get “good ideas” and jump a few steps ahead without even knowing it.

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Partials

• Will come in very handy, especially on larger projects
• Resource-oriented style: a new concept; sure makes development easier. I wonder if there are situations where it gets you in trouble though…need more research.

Second model: comments

• Again, I’m impressed how easy it is to add a major chunk of an app.
• Refactoring: I didn’t expect the render method to iterate as it does—I expected it to still need to be inside the <% @article.comments.each do |comment| %> loop.

Authentication

• A “log out” function would be nice, but HTTP basic auth is pretty limited in what it can do.

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Other notes

• “Article” is one of those weird words that if you look at long enough, you start to wonder if it’s really spelled correctly
• I’m itching to put in a bit of CSS to improve the table listing layout and the textarea size, but am holding back since this won’t become a public project and learning RoR is more important than this demo project  looks.
• Note to future self: private and protected methods go last in the controller file.

Final code for the day again is on GitHub.

What’s next? Haven’t completely decided yet…