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I was recently contacted by a previous client about modifying his site. He wanted a list of changes and additional features added. When I began preparing to make the changes, I was thrown into a mildly nightmarish flashback. His site was one of the first that I had ever worked on. At that point in the game, my coding skills were somewhat lacking. The site is fully functional and easy to use on the outside, but underneath is a codebase that I am almost ashamed to say I created. I chose to build the site using PHP. That was the first server side language I had ever used.

My first thought was to go through and make the changes and then addon the new features last. After I started with the changes, I began to remember why I started avoiding PHP. For a long time now, my personal preference has been to use the web framework Ruby on Rails. Going from using Ruby back to PHP just makes working on his site seem even harder. Once the frustration had begun to set in, I had the idea to see how had it would be to redo his site using rails. After talking with my client about the idea of a full makeover, he was very supportive of the idea. It originally took me about two months to make his site from start to end. I began this task of transitioning his site from PHP to Ruby two weeks ago today. I have just finished deploying the site. In the past two weeks, I was able to implement all of the features he already had with improvements, all of the additional features he wanted and even some that we came up with along the way. So far, all parties involved are pleased with the results. And now I’m a bigger fan of RoR than ever.

Tags: ruby rails php

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