rails is ridiculously easy for this kind of application, sorry I'll try to read mor of this and post some pointers, but wiki.rubyonrails.org is amazing.
i've started the work. i've been fixing up me schema a lot, and i've got some of the basic functions of the site up and running locally. in a few days, i'll be ready to check the code into SVN o...
yeah. that's the most important part. make sure your relationships are good. Also you should look into "Single Table Inheritance" for example class Topic end class ForumThread 'my journa...
i definitely gotta do it that way! i do it like that in the current Java code now, to a certain degree. but if i clean up the schema a bit more, this could really shine.
yeah, that is a slight drawback to STI. it's illustrated here:
http://www.martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/singleTableInheritance.html
all properties of all classes in the inheritance tree are present in the table as fields.
but its not really a problem, as the unused fields are just left unpopulated.
yeah that works. sti helps with searching too.
So, i wrote a migration to create a topics table to merge news, forum_threads, and journals into one table. I combined all the columns. There's only a few that aren't shared, so that's not bad.
Got it working, seems pretty nice.
The only thing I'm wondering now is... do I need separate controllers for each of the models now? So much of the logic is the same, and I want to keep it DRY. Any ideas on sharing some of the logic?