Given a short code demo, it looks very flexible. It can be used to build things extremely quickly. In just a few key strokes, a model, view and controller is automatically created in the file system. Another command will quickly update the database to describe the properties of your newly created entity in its own table.

This bares some similarities with the PHP framework Symfony. You can auto generate the entities of your system in a very similar way. But I am a PHP freak, why am I so interested in this? It’s always good to have another arrow to your bow. Also, I think it’s an important message to those who want to try out programming for web applications. Perhaps students or in some cases, people who have been stuck using classic VB for the past 5 years!

Some may say that using the Ruby on Rails framework the auto generation of code is unwise. Unwieldy and unmanageable and I would tend to agree with them. However, perhaps it has some uses for prototyping an idea or a technical draft. If the specification or idea keeps changing, then its a perfect match. I am not sure if you can do this but, since its heavy on MVC, components of the system can be replaced (if necessary) with whatever means necessary.

It’s meant to be easier to develop with it in Linux and Mac than Windows. Saying that there’s a package for the Aptana editing suite for Windows that seems well suited to Ruby. There’s an online demo of Ruby, somewhere on the Internet, I will post it as soon as I remember where it is.

Perhaps in a few years, I will read this again on a site that I built in Ruby, years from now. But for now, I don’t think I will start learning Ruby just yet. There’s plenty of other things I would like to do first, that could change.

Given that the existing home page has to remain the same until your ready to “activate” the new one. You can modify the .htaccess file so the Wordpress site will only respond if the homepage has been called with a particular query string. This means you can test the Wordpress build without interrupting the main index page.

In order to do this, you have to modify your .htaccess file in the website root. Below is the modified .htaccess file, take a backup before testing!


# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-content/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wp-includes/
RewriteRule . /$1/?test=true [L]
# END WordPress


Replace your existing .htaccess file with the code above and you are half way. Next modify your index.php in the wordpress site.


if(isset($_GET["test"])){
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
/* Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
}else{
/* Your holding page HTML / include file */
}


You can redirect to, or include the existing index page within the else clause as described above. The links should still be intact because the .htaccess file is appending your url with the required query string.

So when you visit the site your existing homepage should remain the same. When you visit http://yoursite.com/?test=true your wordpress site should wake up and run accordingly.