Rethinking Content Whiteboards

Ruby Apps Typo
1

At the moment we’re holding whiteboards as a serialised field in
contents table. Which was fine when we were also caching the HTML
representations there too – whiteboards generally got (re)generated
during text formatting and got magically saved along with the html
renderings.

But now, the rendered html is managed by the controller and held in
a different sort of cache, so the article doesn’t get saved, so the
whiteboard data gets thrown away. Which is not good.

So, my thinking is add something like:

class Whiteboard
serialize :data

 def method_missing(:method, *args)
   method.to_s =~ /^(.*)(=?)$/
   key = $1
   is_assignment = !$2.blank?

   unless data.has_key? key
     return super(:method, *args)
   end

   if is_assignment
     data[key] = *args
   else
     data[key]
   end
 end

end

And having a table definition like

create_table :whiteboards do |t|
t.column :name, :string
t.column :data, :text
end

The tricky part might be in getting a working acts_as_hash
implementation, but that’s a SMOP.

Thoughts?

2

Sounds good.

After watching my logs yesterday, I’m seriously considering ditching a
lot of the sweeper implementation and switching to something like
this:

if Article, Page, or Settings changed -> sweep everything
elsif Comment or Trackback -> sweep page, add +60 minute trigger to
sweep everything if one doesn’t already exist.

We should probably also add a ‘if comment is published’ in there
somewhere, because even spam comments are nuking my cache.

Scott