A Full Featured Blog

This tutorial walks you through creating a blog from scratch. Focus will be on the Rails aspects, so some "shortcuts" are taken such as integrating a Wordpress theme instead of developing a CSS theme yourself. In the end, the blog will have the normal blog features such as blog posts and comments, but also some extra features like static pages, syntax highlighting for your code, RSS, link bars, etc.

Step 1: Scaffolding Posts
Without a framework like Rails, and particularly the scaffold generator, getting up and running with any project was a pain. You'd be doing a lot of configuring and planning and typing out all the methods to create blog posts and interact with the database. Rails does all this in just a few commands, and while it's not something you'll want to...

Step 2: Integrating a Wordpress Theme
The scaffold generator does output workable HTML, but it's a bit spartan. Plain white pages, nothing good to look at. Let's give our new blog some style by adapting a Wordpress theme.

Step 3: Authentication with Devise
Before we get too invested in our blog, we need to set up some authentication. Since the goal is to allow users to register and post comments, we'll also need a way to differentiate between normal users and bloggers. We'll be using the popular and capable Devise gem to handle authentication for us.

Step 4: Working on the Views
Now that the blog is fully functional, it's time to ditch the boring views generated by the scaffold generator. We'll also implement pagination using the will_paginate gem and RedCloth formatting using the RedCloth gem.

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