How do you do things like this?

[YoungGun21]

Not knowing any rails and not being able to find an ultra cheap host for rails doesn't make it seem that plausible. :/

Not knowing a language is no excuse, especially in your case where time is not a factor. I learned basic Perl in like 3 weeks, and now after like 1.5 months I would consider myself knowledgeable in it. Ruby looks just as easy to learn, so it won't be hard. Find a nice tutorial, start making some simple programs, and move up from there. This is how you learn any programming language by yourself.

 

[Cogman]

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1055682/good-ruby-on-rails-free-hosting

Free hosting is available (or is that not cheap enough?)

 

[quikah]

Not sure how helpful this will be, but there is a fully functional "social network" website with source code available here:

http://incubator.apache.org/olio/

I think it is way more featured than what you want, but it is a good learning tool. You can create users, schedule events, search events, friend each other, etc. It was built as a benchmark, but the website actually works. There are java, php and rails implementations.

 

[hooflung]

Writing it in PHP using CodeIgniter will give you the most hosting flexibility. It is as good as a framework as it gets and you don't have to learn any of Rails' conventions which can and do tie you into your tech.

CodeIgniter's conventions are very light and their documentation is next to none. Rails is very, very bad for people with tight budgets just like Tomcat. You need at least 512mb of ram just to get a site up for any basic Fast-CGI language.

So unless you use Google apps for your email (have full Name Server control of your server) and can get away with using SQLite or a ISAM Mysql install you will run out of memory when your site gets popular. And at that point you will have to not only increase your hosting environment but rethink your database solution that you started off with because of memory limitations in the first place.

You could go with something like:

nginx, php 5.3, google apps for mail, mongoDB for data backend and run a 64mb memcached server on a 512mb virtual private server for about 20-25 bucks (Linode.com is my recommendation). Run a codeigniter site and you are in business.

You'll even get a hardened php install at linode because you can choose Ubuntu server.

You could do the same with rails but you'll need to kick it up to do a Phusion Passenger setup to get any speed out of it. Also, ruby's garbage collecting is a joke. The best (read that as solid and scalable) rails sites run on JRuby.

 

[TridenT]

bump

A CMS is pretty much essential in this case. I'm trying to figure out how I would do this with Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress. :/

 

[Cogman]

bump

A CMS is pretty much essential in this case. I'm trying to figure out how I would do this with Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress. :/

No, a CMS, is not what you are looking for. We've told you what you need. There isn't some shortcut here.

 

[aceO07]

Rails is very, very bad for people with tight budgets just like Tomcat. You need at least 512mb of ram just to get a site up for any basic Fast-CGI language.

I run a couple of Rails office apps on a 256MB VM on a Pentium M 1.6ghz laptop.

For the OP's use, it will probably work fine. Unless he's expecting a good amount of concurrent users.

 

[YoungGun21]

bump

A CMS is pretty much essential in this case. I'm trying to figure out how I would do this with Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress. :/

I don't know if Drupal will do what you want, but I will tell you it would be awesome to use if it worked for your purpose. I looked and looked and looked to try to find a way to make Drupal work for my website idea, but there was just nothing out there. It is such a neat thing, but it just isn't very broad.

 

[TridenT]

No, a CMS, is not what you are looking for. We've told you what you need. There isn't some shortcut here.

This guy gets it close on Drupal. http://www.glumbo.com/drupal7/dances
He showed me that over on webhostingtalk.

 

[Cogman]

This guy gets it close on Drupal. http://www.glumbo.com/drupal7/dances
He showed me that over on webhostingtalk.

what he has done is impressive, however, I would be willing to bet that the work he did to get that far is the same work you would have to do in something like rails.

 

[TridenT]

what he has done is impressive, however, I would be willing to bet that the work he did to get that far is the same work you would have to do in something like rails.

I'm skeptical of these 'free/cheap' rails websites you guys have been showing. I rather keep going on the track that I am with PHP/MySQL.

PHP/MySQL is going to work on just about any server situation. Rails will not. It's only useful if you have the money to back it up.

 

[Cogman]

I'm skeptical of these 'free/cheap' rails websites you guys have been showing. I rather keep going on the track that I am with PHP/MySQL.

PHP/MySQL is going to work on just about any server situation. Rails will not. It's only useful if you have the money to back it up.

Why are you skeptical about rails servers/websites?

 

[aceO07]

This guy gets it close on Drupal. http://www.glumbo.com/drupal7/dances
He showed me that over on webhostingtalk.

You could probably do that in Rails in 1-2 weeks without knowing Rails. I did my first app in 2 weeks by reading the book and following their tutorial.

You can definitely do the same in PHP. Good luck with whatever you chose. Doesn't matter if it's PHP, Rails, Java, etc as long as you accomplish your goal.