[Rails] (newbie?) Questions regarding local Rails installations as a CMS for remote websites

[Scott Phelps]

On Dec 14, 2005, at 2:57 PM, Samo Korosec wrote:

>
> On Dec 14, 2005, at 2:24 PM, Samo Korosec wrote:
>>>  Ruby and Rails and after some of the demos I saw I want to make  
>>> my next CMS with Rails. The idea behind using Rails is basically  
>>> to have the Rails CMS run locally on the customer's intranet/ 
>>> computer and synchronising it with their website as needed. The  
>>> reason for the more "complicated" approach is the tendency of  
>>> customers to have "their" webspace providers run anything from  
>>> Linux/PHP/MySQL only to Windows/PHP/MSSQL and I don't want to  
>>> rewrite the CMS all the time - plus they have an up to date  
>>> version of their website for backup at all times.
>>>
>>> So the questions: Is something like that feasible? I tought of  
>>> uploading new content via FTP and sending an update to MySQL  
>>> directly or even uploading an XML file and loading that into  
>>> MySQL via PHP/Whatever. Are there ways to simply synchronise/ 
>>> access the remote (My)SQL database and upload the neccessary data  
>>> via FTP? Do you guys have any pointers where I should look for  
>>> the relevant information or which functions/functionality I  
>>> should look up in the documentation? Are there any special  
>>> situations to consider or does anyone have experience with  
>>> something similiar?
>
> This is kinda vague.  Depending on the content you could simply use  
> SOAP to perform the necessary RPC's between these distributed  
> processes.

It's vague because I have a bunch of different platforms to  
potentially deal with, most of the time with very limited options to  
adapt said systems. :o)

My thinking was to simply keep track of what has been updated and  
either generate SQL or an XML file of the content and articles. Then  
those would be parsed on the server and the media would be uploaded  
via FTP. Where I was unsure is whether the FTP and MySQL-related  
functionality is there (in Ruby and Rails),

Rails is not SQL specific it uses the Active Record ORM.
As far as FTP - that is not a function (api) in any languages I know  
of.  You'll have to write it in Ruby or use post data for uploads.

>>> so I can simply present the user a "synchronise" button and the  
>>> data is pushed. I don't need realtime synchronisation and would  
>>> prefer to keep as much as possible in Ruby/Rails, so I can deploy  
>>> it with the customer without the need to rewrite the CMS all the  
>>> time for different hosting solutions.

>>> And of course it has to be done yesterday, so a simple solution  
>>> would be best.

LOL!