== Running this project
You're welcome to try it. The recaptha keys have been removed so I don't know if it will be too happy about that. 

== Version One
This is the version of singleforest.com that appears in the screenshots named "VersionOne". I'm no long developing this copy. The version I am working on as of July 7, 2010 is called "SF".

VersionOne has openid as the only login option. SF uses a traditional username/password because the rack-openid gem or one of it's dependancies does not handle Ruby 1.9 encodings properly.

VersionOne was built to eventually use MySQL or Postgres in production. SF uses MongoDB in both development and production.

== Design problems in this version
The way comments are stored is a massive headache. The `CommentThread` model was meant speed up retrieving comments from the database by only requiring a single lookup on an integer field on the `Comments` model instead of a string field and integer field. The current model for comments in SF uses a polymorphic field instead. The `CommentThread` model has layers of attribute caching for things like "is the parent locked?" which is difficult to manage. 

The registration and login pages are handled in the same controller. This makes the SessionController too large to easily understand.

There is too much abstraction and not enough design in the interface at the moment. The placement of controls and links were never planned out. The `control_box` helper method ended up becoming used for every list of links that might be needed on a page. Most of the interface is prototyped at best. 

There are navigational dead ends and some pages redirect back to the wrong page. (SF fixes this by allowing explicit redirects from the previous page.)

== Where are the tests?
Two reasons. 

First, I haven't learned any rails testing. Some time ago I read about rails and unit testing. The only things I saw in the examples I read was testing validations to make sure the validations worked. I could not think of anything more absurd than building tests to test an already tested framework. I know better know. 

Second, it's not really possible to write tests for an non-existent implementation of a website that doesn't have a fixed design.  I would try 5 or 6 implementations before deciding on one, then I would move to the next topic and come back later and change the design. I didn't know what I wanted to build. 

== What now?
I'm slowly working on SF and being a little more careful with my design so I don't have a massive screw up like this again.