On the Slow Train with Rails 2.0

August and I have been fans and avid users of Ruby on Rails for a couple years now, which also means that we chipped our teeth on Rails 1.x up until only recently. And while the transition to Rails 2.0 hasn't really caused us too many headaches, we haven't escaped unscathed. August posted to our brand spanking new Web Technologies Group blog yesterday about some of the troubles we've been working around with Rails 2.0 for Flagstaff and other Rails applications on our servers. Luckily, he picked up a trick to make life easier for people who are more accustomed to the ways in which Rails 1.x handled scaffolding. Smack the link for some insight.

We're just about set with our configurations and ready to move forward with Flagstaff development. August is in Portland, Oregon for Rails Conf, which should prove to be a very insightful trip for him (plus, after I showed him some pictures of the Oregon coastlines, he resolved himself to plan his trip around sightseeing, so he'll undoubtedly receive some other benefits from the trip). But his absence will probably slow down the Flagstaff work a little more than usual. Nonetheless, I'm in the process of laying the foundation for some features that we're bringing into Flagstaff from some of our past work, so stay tuned.

Welcome to the Flagstaff Blog!

Flagstaff is a web-based package intended for local governments, municipal districts, and other organizations looking to make themselves and their business more transparent to the general public. With all the fancy new Internet technologies of the present day, government has fallen far behind the times. It's time to catch up. Flagstaff introduces a powerful yet seamlessly connected set of tools for getting important information out to the general public. Documents, financial and budget visualizations, project updates, contact information, and other content can all be easily shared with the public using Flagstaff.

We're just getting started with the development cycle for Flagstaff, but we'll be posting regular (i.e. about every 2-3 days) updates as we develop the software. Flagstaff is an open source project to be released under the GNU Public License (v2) in cooperation with the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) Center for Open Source Software. It is primarily developed by August Fietkau and Brian R Zaik, two current students at RPI.