I was asked to provide a flexible photography portfolio site – brochure type site.

Given Rails was on my “fad” list, I decided to have a go that way.

What I came up with was a ‘generic’ Rails Engine to do the work of pulling the galleries etc together. This was then used inside a specific Rails app which just had the photos/galleries/comments. The aim being that the site owner can arrange things as they want and then do a commit/push to heroku to update their site.

The Engine is open source, available on github here.

Its a bit dated now, using Rails 3.0.9 – although should be easy to update, as its quite simple :) – the Gemfile only has Rails, Capybara and sqlite3 – not sure why the last 2 are there – as no DB is used.

The controllers do the work of responding to various user requests – using the folder/image structure found in the host app to define the site structure.

In the model directory, there are several classes.  photo – is used to wrap each photo image, including a related thumbnail and caption. project – wraps a directory, tracking what images are in it. site_config – this handles parsing the overall site configuration, which is held in a YAML file in the host Rails app.

The lib directory defines the basic engine configuration – how it hooks into the host app.

Under test/dummy there is a minimal rails app using the engine – for testing.  Although I cant see a sample config file – perhaps it relied on the defaults :)

At the time, it seemed a good way to produce the site.  I’ve not had to use it again yet, and that will be the test of how ‘generic’ it is…