Use Rails for the documentation site

[sullimander]

The curriculum is about learning rails, but the docs site is built using sinatra. This makes it more difficult for students to be able to contribute to the documentation. Rails is not be the best technical fit for this type of site, but it may be the right choice for encouraging participation.

I am happy to do the work if others agree that this is a good idea.

[tjgrathwell]

Strong 👎 from me.

Though I appreciate anything that makes it easier for people to update the curriculum, converting the current site to Rails doesn't seem like a good fit to me. When we consider what the current site looks like, we see

• A set of curricula in /sites, each composed of step-pages that basically compile to static pages, using a special DSL.
• Some common HTML layout for all sites.
• Javascript and CSS to enhance the appearance and functionality of the aforementioned static sites.

If this were to be converted into a Rails app, we might either:

• Make a route/controller/template for each page, which adds needless complexity to the application, or
• Set up a magic catch-all route that auto-loads a template based on the URL (like the Sinatra router is doing), which doesn't at all resemble what students have learned in the Rails curriculum.

There's been some mumblings about converting from Sinatra/Erector to a more modern hipster framework like Jekyll or Middleman, which I am also not excited about but seems like a better fit for this sort of site.

Realistically, the percentage of students who are willing and able to contribute after going to a workshop is low, so I don't know how many people are discouraged from contributing for this reason. If a student or volunteer wants to make a simple copy change, there is a "git" link on the top of every page that takes them to Github where they can make their edit. If they want to make a large change to the structure of the curriculum, it requires building an awareness of the application structure, which would take some time regardless of if it's written in Sinatra or Rails or Middleman or ASP.NET or whatever.

It's important to me that when these conversations occur we focus on the actual problems people are having contributing to the curriculum, and solve them in the most effective way possible that doesn't provide needless churn. When I hear "we should convert the whole thing to framework_x", I imagine a period of disruptive rewrite that is likely to be followed by the exact same frequency of substantive contribution in the future. So I ask, what problems are we trying to solve? Who has been trying to contribute and got stuck? What can we do to help them?

[sullimander]

I am not sure that it is really a problem, just something that I thought of while updating some of the documentation, and thought I would bring it up.

[alexch]

What Travis said. 👏

A shorter answer is, Rails was designed for building dynamic
database-driven web applications, and is not necessarily a good fit for
generated static documentation sites.

Maybe we should address this in the README since it does feel odd at first
blush.