Matt Lee

I'm Matt Lee, one of the folks behind behind Foo Communications, a company/experiment in music and social media, including Libre.fm, a new social media platform that offers musicians exclusive promotion and play in exchange for licensing their music under a free culture license, and GNU social, a federated social networking project.

Building a web app in Rails - part one

So, I've got another little Rails app to build. I'm going to try and blog the entire process.
The idea is pretty simple:-

  • A system to hold articles
  • Articles must be searchable
  • Articles must have a WYSIWYG interface

Skimming over some of the other details, we see obvious stuff like:-

  • Each article must have a unique reference number
  • The ability to add articles must be restricted to a bunch of users

Even a few oxymorons like:-

  • These 'site administrators' should also have the ability to change access permissions of other users of the site
  • Users should not have to log into the site individually
  • The default level of access for all users other than those named above should be “Read Onlyâ€?

If most people don't need to login, why bother with a permissions interface? Why not just say 'if a user is logged in, he/she can add new users', and assume a user can do anything they need?
So, time to crack open emacs and get coding.

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