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….
Weekend America has a segment this week, and a spot on their home page, about the public radio talent quest. Bill Radke interviews Jake Shapiro about the contest, and what it’ll take to win.
NY Times has some coverage today on the Talent Quest Competition that PRX has undertaken with a grant from CPB.
Contest opens April 16th – be or pick the next Ira Glass!
Have a look, there’s also a very short prez I gave at the IMA 2007 Conference showing how we use S3, ActiveMq, Rails, ActiveMessaging and other junk like that to make our systems hum.
Long ago I installed apache 2 instead of the lame-o version of apache that comes with OS X so I could use it to test rails configurations. Lately, I have been doing more work with Drupal (e.g. Public Radio Talent Quest), and messing with WordPress, so I wanted to run them locally to make my development much easier.
Also, I should mention, I try to avoid installing anything using fink or mac ports. Not because there is anything wrong with them per se, but I like control over what I install and where it goes, and as 9 times out of 10 I am going to be installing the same thing on at least 1 other OS, I want to do it from scratch. I am probably insane.
When I went to search for some easy instructions for installing php5 and apache2, best thing I could find was here. Wasn’t bad, just change the instructions to prefix under “/usr/local/”, and all went well.
Then I hit the PHP5 make, and it died, the error turns out to be pretty well known, and is related to PHP5 only compiling against MySql 4, whereas I live in this century and run MySql 5. Apparently there is a bug report for this. A quick install of mysql 4 from the tar.gz package, and updating the softlink for /usr/local/mysql, and everything compiled. Flip the soft link back to MySql 5, and so far everything runs fine.
So once again, with a bit more work, compiling from src triumphs!