I like to always have at least one project on the go that works as a testbed for a variety of new Rails techniques, tools and releases. For a long time that project was Grand Rapids WiFi, a site that lapsed into some neglect after I moved (a long way) away from the town it focussed on, but which I still officially maintain. It was where I first tried Rails 1.1 and 1.2, where I got to grips with various geo tools, and where I first generated RDF and Atom from a Rails app.
With this morning’s announcement that there’s a release candidate of Rails 2.3 out, I decided the time was ripe to dust off the GR WiFi code and move it from Rails 1.2.x to 2.3.0. It turned out to be a nice quick process, even allowing for the time it took to move it all onto github.
- Tidy up environment.rb to remove some deprecated features, and specify the new gem version
- Run rake rails:update to rename application.rb to application_controller.rb
- Remove quite a few defunct plugins that we didn’t need anyway
- Replace a couple of plugins with relevant calls to config.gem
- Rip out the use of components (what was I thinking?) and add a new model to help with sidebars
- Tidy up a few old paths
- Update my deploy script to get the code from git rather than svn
This site was where I really learned my way around rails’ test/unit-based testing framework and I’m sad to say that the tests now lie rather neglected. If time allows, I’ll kick them back into shape so they can be used to uncover any dark corners of the code that haven’t survived the transition, but for now I just wanted to get the site upgraded quickly and hopefully running a bit more efficiently.
For those who’d like to play with the code, it’s all public now over on github. I make no promises as to the quality of the code, but feel free to take it, use it, path it, etc. If you do end up using it for anything, please do let me know.
Tags: grand rapids wifi, ruby on rails, upgrading