Welcome to in_transition

in_transition is a custom web application built on the Ruby on Rails web framework. This application serves as a testing ground for various concepts/plugins. The long term focus of the application is to track Transition Initiatives in the Pittsburgh area.

www.transitionnetwork.org/resources/transition-primer

Installation

This is a rails 3 application and uses bundler to manage it’s dependencies. If necessary, install bundler via:

gem install bundler

Then:

git clone git://github.com/jtgeibel/in_transition.git
cd in_transition
bundle install --without production

Intended Functionality

• Wiki-style Blogging and Group Postings

• Initiatives and Work Groups

  • Meeting Notes (open space)

  • News Stories

  • Events

• Skills Swapping (#8. Facilitate the Great Reskilling)

• Links to Local Resources

Plugins Used

This application is comprised of many external plugins. A high level overview of these plugins is provided here.

Haml

haml-lang.com

HAML is used for the application’s view templates. HAML provides a structured way to interlace HTML and Ruby code.

I also use a similar templating language for style sheets. Compass: compass-style.org/

Devise

github.com/plataformatec/devise

Devise is an authorization framework and handles user registration, sign-in, passwords, and email confirmation.

declarative_authorization

github.com/stffn/declarative_authorization

Provides role based authorization. It uses an array of symbols (returned by the role_symbols method of the current user) and config/authorization_rules.rb to determine what actions a user (or guest) can take.

friendly_id

github.com/eric/friendly_id

Handles permalinks and slugging. Text based IDs should help us rank better with search engines.

Other Plugins

• inherited_resources: github.com/josevalim/inherited_resources

• simple-navigation: github.com/andi/simple-navigation

• simple_form: github.com/plataformatec/simple_form