Yesterday we pushed the button and launched the new version of GOOD Magazine, a site I’ve been working on for the past couple of months along with the folks at Area17. It’s a relatively large Ruby on Rails system built on top of the ORGware system (refitted as an engine) and supported with a caching system built for Madame Figaro.
Most of my work has been under the hood, but where I’ve touched the frontend I’ve tried to make use of microformats and other good practices. We’re providing a range of atom feeds (which will become easier to find over time as we make some refinements) but eventually I hope that we’ll have all listing pages using hAtom so that anything can be a feed.
The project’s been yet another reminder of the importance of a good test suite. Because we’re using an engine most of the test code has been in the form of integration tests (functional tests don’t automatically pick up the code from the engine) but I quickly lost count of the number of bugs that the tests helped me squish quickly, let alone prevented in the first place.
It’s always good when the placeholder content is interesting, and I’ve been enjoying reading the content from the magazine as I’ve worked on the site. Check it out at www.goodmagazine.com. I have to go and push out another update.