Working on a large tutorial on building a CMS with Ruby on Rails
Hello fellow Indie Hackers 👋🏼
I'm working on a mega tutorial (would have at least 6 or 7 instances). I will cover setting up a new Rails application, adding Active Admin, configuring Devise for Authentication and Pundit for Authorizations and will then create some necessary models for a CRM (like the Employee, Client, Service and Appointment). I plan on closing this series by demonstrating how to integrate Stripe for managing subscriptions and a few tricks to ensure this CRM can be monetized as a multi-tenant SaaS solution.
Would this be an interesting read for you? Is there something (technical) I didn't mention above but would be useful to direct in this series?
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Speaking to @DmitryBorody's ask below, at this stage it would be far more interesting, practical and forward-thinking to demonstrate how to use StimulusReflex and CableReady to achieve reactive behaviours without needing to even consider a complex solution like React. This is conceptually similar to how Hey.com was built, for example.
Since the client-side aspect of SR is built on Stimulus, it is going to work beautifully with Turbolinks out of the gate.
Happy to help with any questions you might have.
Wow, just checked out these two technologies and very excited to learn more about them! It's a totally new paradigm to me, and I can definitely see the potential.
I'm 100% convinced and agree that they'll be a better choice your tutorial.
For SPA folks like myself having a practical tutorial covering them would be super-helpful to dive into the modern Ruby world.
Right on. I have a few resources to suggest.
First, there's a relatively short video that goes from zero to hero in about ten minutes that is really popular. There's a small army of friendly Rails devs willing to help people get up and running 24/7 on Discord. And there's a great list of sample applications with code available on the Expo.
Once you're fully in learning mode, there's a really excellent series by Stephen Fiser on YouTube where he builds an entire content management platform in Rails, pretty much step by step, and he makes extensive use of both StimulusReflex and CableReady. You can find that series on TechmakerTV.
I really want to stress that we will 100% meet you half-way. If you are excited to learn, we will not leave you in the cold.
I'd be happy to read such a tutorial. Coming from a different world of SPAs, React and Node.js, I'd like to see if it'd be easier / faster to build such systems using a server-side framework like Rails.
I'd appreciate if you showed how to build the frontend using something like React or Vue, and make it work nicely with the Rails app.
Avoiding full page refresh, so that the app feels more like an SPA (Turbolinks?) is another topic I'd be curious to learn more about.
Good luck 🙌
Great ideas. Thanks Dmitry
Sounds great... wud love it
Seems like a great idea
I have been a rails dev for about 7 years. Rails is dying. Yes, a few companies are still being made with it, but its really not a great choice for small startups any more compared to tools like Go, PostgraphQL, etc.
Rails is also an "old" technology that honestly hasn't changed much in the last 5 years. This means that the tutorial written 5 years ago that has thousands of reviews on Teachable/Udemy/whatever else is still very relevant (and probably up to date).
Specifically on the CRM angle, there are sooo many open source mature Rails CRMs that it seems most people would not be starting green slate when they can use one of the many existing CRMs to get 80% there. A CRM just isn't that interesting thing for people to learn.
As others have said, maybe you could educate people on how to use some of the newer frameworks (stimulusReflex, CableReady, jets) and that might be more interesting. But I wouldn't be excited about a "learn how to build rails applications in 2020" This idea would of been clutch in like 2014.