Hello everyone. I agree that Hobo needs to be a friendlier topic to approach. As a new devotee to the Rails way of doing things I have had to learn a very large amount of information in short space of time. I feel like I've got a decent understanding of ruby and rails, and have built some baby rails apps to test my knowledge. I then stumbled across Hobo, and my first thought was: "Wow!" I'm totally sold on Hobo, and I really like the concept of DRYML, but I am having real trouble getting my bearings because of all the inconsistencies in the documentation. I have found much of what is currently documented very misleading when it comes to working with the current version. I initially tried the agility tutorial, and eventually got that working by digging around in various places for the information I needed. I also had a look at the screencasts, the manual or cookbook, the Pod tutorial, and the re- skinning your app from a css theme example. After reading everything I could lay my hands on, I would say that I'm still hanging by a thread in terms of being able to successfully do anything worthwhile in Hobo. I guess the main problem is that at the moment when I find a piece of information about Hobo and try to implement it, if it does not give me the expected result I can't be sure that it's something that I have done wrong. Half the time it turns out that the "way" of doing things has changed and therefore that information is obsolete. This makes it very hard to learn from your mistakes, whilst having solid information to fix things. For example something as simple as removing the theme from a Hobo app. Just remove <set-theme name="name_of_theme"/> from application.dryml the tutorial confidently states. This now breaks everything! Just one example of what I am talking about. I know that there are statements about some tutorials being out of date, but I can't find any information that works 100% without my having to dig around for an answer. I'm sure a lot of my problems are very easily solvable and will probably have some of the advanced Hobo'ers rolling their eyes, but it would be really helpful to have a resource for Hobo information that was concise and up to date.
I think the concept of transferring an existing site over to Hobo would be an excellent starting point for newbies such as myself. How about an example of the best way to do this with a static site, and then perhaps an existing Rails app? Then I think people following the documentation would get a nice gentle introduction into Hobo with the first example, plus explanations of file locations, and critical "can't do anything without knowing this" information. Then with the second example people would see how Hobo builds on top of what already exists in Rails, and how the development process changes because of this. An explanation of what is actually bundled up with Hobo would also be really useful. For example what Javascripts does Hobo use? What about Flash? I think this would alleviate the problems that neewbs will encounter, make things more fun, and ultimately encourage enthusiastic people to continue learning about Hobo. It might also help the advanced guys as well, because they won't be getting inundated with confused newbie questions! As an example of what I am talking about here is a confused neewbie question! I am trying to move an existing static site: http://www.ianalexanderwood.com over to Hobo. I want to add a Blog/commenting section on the home page, and for the time being leave everything else as it is. Using Hobo I can then begin to develop the site away from it's static origins into a fully fledged content managed app. This situation would occur a lot for me, as a lot of the work I do on the web originates in a static "design" based way. I can see large issues in how some of this might work (like the actionscript 3 Flash menu navigation) but before I can even get to any of these issues I am floundering on something relatively basic. I have created models and controllers for each of the pages that I will be moving into Hobo. For the time being I was going to abandon the Flash navigation and go with the standard Hobo tabs. I have tabs for "home" "posts" "images" "sites" and "sounds" I want the "posts" tab to vanish whilst retaining the links to it in the "home" page and I want to remove the links in "home" to all of the other pages. If I put: auto_actions :all, :except => :index in my "posts" controller it removes the tab and the links. How do I control them individually, and how do I control these things in the home page tab? There is no home controller, only the front controller, which will not accept auto_actions. Like I said, neewb questions but I think all I need is to be pointed in the right direction. Thanks, and apologies for the very long post! Ian On Dec 7, 11:35 pm, Eric-news <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Hobo-lovers, > > Since I've stumbled upon Hobo I'm really struggling to climb the > learning curve that's always involved with these things. I'm convinced > Hobo is what I'm looking for, and the point that it's not ripe for > production yet doesn't bother me much, since my site is non-profit. > The enthusiasm surrounding Hobo is good to see and very promising and > soon I will be using cutting edge technology! > > The tutorials are really impressive, if not somewhat overwhelming. > > I'm not only new to Hobo, but also (fairly) new to Rails. I've read > much theory regarding Ruby and Rails, but discovering Hobo (and > Phusion Passenger) convinced me this is the way to proceed. > > What I would like to see for the lesser gods like me, is a tutorial > that shows how to create a fairly simple website with some category- > buttons on a left panel and some detail-info buttons on top (or the > other way around). And a home button, duh. ;-) > > I mean, a tutorial that doesn't do right to the power of Hobo, but > gives you an old-fashioned 'static' website. But -as a bonus- with all > the pages editable on line by an authorized user. (With the login and > signup-buttons hidden.) > > If I had something like that, I'd have a starting point for an up and > running website. After getting accustomed to that, I then could lookup > the information in the tutorials about how to change the theme, extend > the authorization scheme and then gradually incorporate the real > powers of Hobo into my site. > > The current tutorials are not so much tutorials but proof that Hobo is > what we need. OK, you convinced me, but now I need a starting point. > > My apologies if I'm asking for something that's already on hobocentral > somewhere, perhaps I'm a bit impatient. > > For me, having something usable and trying to change that to my needs > using the documentation will get me much faster to understanding the > ins and outs of Hobo. > > Thanks in advance. > > -- > Greetings, Eric. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Hobo Users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hobousers?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
