My first built-from-scratch Ruby on Rails site is now live: www.newhorizonschool.info. This site is for New Horizon School and Learning Center, a wonderful small school that my son attends. They’re great folks, and they’ve made a big difference in our lives, so I was pleased to be able to help them out and build this site for them. And along the way, I learned a lot about building sites in Rails.

This is a pretty simple site, with mostly static content. Unlike your stereotypical Rails site, this is not a “Web 2.0” creation but just an old fashioned small business site. Nevertheless, I found the Rails environment to be very nice as a templating engine, and it made it easy to implement the small bits of database capability that are there:

• The Resources page is built from a database, so the staff can easily add links, categories, or descriptions through a web-based interface.

• The Alumni form adds records to a database. The staff will be able to download this to integrate into their Filemaker database.

• Contact messages are stored in a database, as well as being sent as emails to the administrator, so they are logged and can be reviewed by other folks.

• All the static text on the site is stored in a database, so the school’s staff can edit any of the text through a web interface. I considered using an existing content management system, but my needs were simple, and by building it from scratch I learned more and was able to make it do exactly what I wanted. The text is all stored in Textile. I hope to polish this up and release it as a plugin at some point.

Over time, I’ll be extending the site with some more sophisticated capabilities.

The banner was created by fellow parent Mario Zelaya. It sure adds a lot to the overall feeling of the site, especially compared to the solid-color box I had there!

I’d love to hear any feedback you have on the site. And if you want to help a great cause, just visit the Giving page and click on one of those Donate buttons at the bottom…