We had some fun folks from both the station/network side of PRX, and the independent producer side of the biz come hang out with us and talk about what to do next. Much of what we heard is now fermenting into the sweet brew of the next PRX release. For a non-PRX take on the meeting and the future of PRX, pull a few gems from the bag of insights that Todd Mundt left on his bloggy doorstep:
PRX has been around just long enough that now is good time to reassess strategy. That seems to be happening. But a few things are already clear: PRX is public radio’s fourth network; it’s the open source public radio network, and for those of us who are beginning to look for fresh, new voices to add to our schedules, it’s the best place to start.
With the Tapestry tap celebration this weekend, it’s just in the nick of time that the website for the Beantown Tapfest is now fleshed out.
I still need to spend some time making it prettier, adding images and such things, but most importantly it now has the list of events, and the online registration form which integrates with PayPal (Website Payments Standard in conjuntion with IPN). I am not a big PHP fan, but I do like being able to package up and deploy my new ‘pprf’ (PayPal Registration Form) plug-in to any WordPress site for testing. I need to make it a bit more generic, and add one more admin page, but hey, it works and I’ll probably release it as open source soon.
I’m mostly happy with the logo, as IANAD(esigner) – anything that comes from Illustrator out of my computer should be suspect, but I think the logo looks good.
Now on with the day, and hoping a get some rest before Tapestry classes kick my butt.
…it’s small, but found a bug in the new filter code in the ActionController for rails edge.
Showed up using habtm with ActiveScaffold – go figure.
Lesson learned – Array.insert should probably be named Array.insert! – it changes the underlying array, and sometimes that’s not what you mean to do.
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/8383
Now we’ll see if it gets committed.
We use Amazon S3 at PRX for images and more importantly all our audio files. We love it.
What we really want to do is use EC2 – look at the gigavox success story on amazon’s site – we need almost the same things, and want to implement almost the same arch – except using rails and activemessaging.
The problem is the EC2 closed beta – ugh – we’ve been waiting, oh so impatiently. In the meantime everyone shuold go get their feet wet with RightScale. You get 10 hours to play with, even without your own EC2 keys.
comatose is a lovely terse cms that you can integrate into a web application – unlike other rails cms systems which are the application. Thing is, terse is great until you need something it does not do.
At PRX we wanted to be able to upload/resize/attach images and files, have a preview mode to see what the home page would look like before we publish parts of the content, and also we wanted to be able to access session info so we could make some content vary based on info in a user’s session (this is also part of how the ‘preview’ mode works).
Folks on the forums also seem to be trying to figure this kind of thing out, so I humbly offer what I have gotten to work.
So without exposing all the work I am cleaning up on extending comatose, here is a bit of code showing how to add the session info to the comatose pages so it can be accessed and used.
As for the rest of my enhancements – well, I need to make it into a plugin I think, that gets installed on top of comatose. That will have to wait, as I am too busy adding enhancements at the moment to stop and package it….