It’s been a long project, but finally, Village Version 2.0 launches! We (Village and BuzaMoto) worked really hard on it and I think the site turned out great. I urge everyone to check it out. For the curious, the site was built with Rails, and runs an all new version of MudTyper, which supports OTF with kerning in addition to many OTF features (including contextual alternates). More about MudTyper in the future when I have time to write about the more interesting technical aspects of it.

Just before the end of 2009, we launched a new e-commerce website for ProjectNo8. The site was designed by my friend Christian Schmidt. For this website, we decided to build it using Spree, an e-commerce framework built on Rails. Spree was great to work with and really sped up the development time. It was still flexible enough to implement everything we needed to, and it was familiar since it’s built with Rails.

It’s been online for a couple weeks, but here’s an announcement that we just completed the new website for agency:collective. There are also screen captures with captions under our projects page.

Most of our client work involves Rails development. It seems everybody wants a website that allow them to change the content, anytime, anywhere, whenever they like. But I always tell my clients to think about how often this “change” is going to happen. It’s certainly a waste of money to pay for developing some feature that you don’t end up using.

Even with Rails, having an “admin” backend requires extra design and development time. Also, with Rails and most other web frameworks, it’s not completely trivial to deploy and maintain these sites. For the client, it most likely means they need to ditch their current hosting provider and go with someone who will support Rails. Rails support on an affordable host is a hit or miss. I’m still surprised that Dreamhost still claims that they “support” Rails. In the world of VPS, the deployment is an easy thing, but for most clients, maintaining a VPS is a responsibility they don’t want. Why can’t it just work? I agree.

But this post isn’t about Rails. Instead, it’s about revisiting an oldie and ugly [but still sometimes a goodie] friend, PHP.

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