The Quick and Clean Approach

Company Apptrain Software
Client Columbia City Paper
Main features Online Classified Ads with authenication, email verification, live search, and live preview.
 
Excerpt

The owner of the paper would up creating his own account at “rubyforge”:http://www.rubyforge.org , and submitting bugs. ... The project went “live”:http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=5644 a month later.
Study

User Need

Columbia City Paper , an alternative weekly published in Columbia, SC needed a way for it’s readers to post free ads online.

January 2006

In a humble attempt to use an Agile Process , Requirements Gathering began . The first meeting produced an impressive Requirements Document.

 

Since the desired product was essentially yet another Craigslist rip-off, and there was no viable open source alternative, we agreed to make the project open source .

Our client was thrilled when days later, They we’re viewing and editing Classified Ads, Categories and Locations initially created using the scaffolding generator in Rails.

Customer Collaboration

The initial bare bones interface generated plenty of excitement feedback from the customer. Producing software early had the added benefit of encouraging collaboration. The owner of the paper would up creating his own account at rubyforge , and submitting bugs.

Jonathan Hensley did a fantastic job of creating a look and feel for the site. We also benefited from the many great open source contributions available including the ActionMailer built into rails, several great plugins; file_column , acts_as_authenticated , and a few tricks form Rails Recipes .

Working Software

The project went live a month later. The current version runs on Rails 1.2 at http://www.columbiacitypaper.com .

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