Archive for May, 2009


Last Day at End Point

May 28 2009 by railsdog

Today marks my last day of employment at End Point. I was hired by End Point back in February 2008 after they had noticed my work on the Spree project (which was actually called Rails Cart at the time.) They offered to lend their extensive commerce expertise and to help nurture the project, much like they had done for a simliar project known as Interchange which is very popular in the Perl community. It has been an extremely productive partnership and during my tenure with the company the Spree project has really flourished.

My departure from End Point is based largely on personal reasons. After speding the last four years working out of my home office, it recently became apparent to me that I needed to make a change. The home work environment has become way too distracting as my son gets older and more demanding of my time. My office also sits in the center of the house so its pretty much impossible to isolate myself from all of the distractions around me. Believe me, if there was a way to make that situation better I feel I would have discovered it by now.

The only reason why I’m bothering to mention this on the Spree home page is because its possible that this departure will raise questions and concerns about the future of the Spree project. Let me start off by saying that I personally remain committed to the long term stability and success of the Spree project. I’ve given a great deal of thought as to how to best move the project forward. I actually think that recent developments are going to accelerate the pace of this project, as opposed to slowing it down. Here are some things to consider:

  • Core Team: All members of the core team have permission to commit to the Spree core. Removing myself as the sole gatekeeper to what goes into the project has removed a bottleneck that was starting to effect the project adversely. We’re already starting to see reduced wait times for reviewing and committing code contributions. It also reduces my personal stress considerably. I can go away for a long weekend and the project does not need to come to a halt. The core team consists of four developers (including myself) plus some excellent candidates to be added in the future.

  • Strong Community: We have a very strong open source community here at the Spree project. There’s an active mailing list where users help one another without having to rely exclusively on answers from the core team. That’s the sign of a strong community for sure. The issue tracker is buzzing with activity and we are getting a steady stream of patches (and new translations!)

  • New Sponsorship: The Spree project will now be sponsored by Rails Dog (that’s me.) I’ve already invested some money in purchasing the spreecommerce.com domain name. End Point will remain an active partner in the Spree project and they will continue to provide their excelllent hosting services. By taking over sponsorship of the Spree project directly this should help alleviate any concerns that people might have about one single company being too closely tied to the project. Spree is a true open source project. It belongs to all of us and we’re all in this together.

  • New Website: The Spree project will soon be sporting a new website. I’m going to be spending a considerable amount of my personal money into making this site a little more polished and attractive. The new documentation effort is going to be part of this process as well. So you shouldn’t be thinking “Oh noze! There goes Spree!” Spree marches on with even more resources and determination than ever before.

  • Corporate Support: End Point has indicated to me that they intend to stay very active with the project. We can expect to see even more contributions on the mailing list and in the form of source code from these guys. In addition to my new company, there are many other companies out there indicating they are willing to provide support. The more companies using Spree the better for all of us.

My future plans will be taking me to a small company called Econify which is located in Washington, D.C. The owner of the company is actually a friend of mine from college. The office is located close to home and only two blocks from where my wife works so we’ll be able to commute together. They’re also offering a flexible schedule so I can have some predictable time off to schedule my family stuff around. My new company will be doing Spree consulting if anybody is interested. Just drop me an email at sean@railsdog.com if you’ve got either a project or just need a few hours of consulting time to advise on a project.

Spree continues to gain momentum thanks to all of our hard work together. This month the website topped 10,000 visitors for the first time and we’re closing in on 500 watchers in GitHub. We’ve also received contributions from over 60 different developers. I’ll be taking a long weekend off starting tomorrow but then its back to business. I’ll be using the next two weeks to finish off our shiny new website which we hope to launch on June 15. I look forward to even more progress in the second half of the year.

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Posted @ 12:00pm


Sass Stylesheet Refactoring

May 28 2009 by steph

This year at RailsConf, I met Chris Eppstein, a core contributor to the Sass project, and the creator of the Compass framework. Having recently integrated Sass, Compass, and Blueprint in the release of Spree 0.8.0, I wanted to have Chris look at the Spree core Sass implementation. He gave some great insight and as a result, several changes were made to the Spree core described below:

First, with the latest core changes, screen.Sass is broken down into several components, such as:


...
@import mixins.Sass
@import colors.Sass
@import layout.Sass
@import product_detail.Sass
@import cart.Sass
@import checkout.Sass
...

This improved organization will make it easier to adjust the core code for specific page or component changes. For example, one visitor to the RailsConf Spree Birds of a Feather session discussed how his client requires the single page checkout to be overridden and separated into separate steps. Instead of managing the entire screen.Sass stylesheet, he can simply override the checkout.Sass file for the required changes. This modularization will make it easier to adjust style rules without the fear of conflicting with or breaking other site style rules.

Second, a benefit that comes from the Sass improvements is the move to separate color stylesheet rules from the layout style rules. For example, the colors.Sass file contains the following:


...
!input_border = #BBB
!default_border_color = #DDD
!link_hover_color = #eee
!lighter_text_color = #666
!medium_blue = #2E6AB1
!lightest_blue = #BBDAFD
!light_blue = #E5F2F8
!dark_blue = #162F54
...

These color rules are then used throughout the stylesheets. Below is an example of their implementation:


#header
 :position relative
 :color = !medium_blue
 :clear both
 a
   :color = !medium_blue
   &:hover
     :color = !light_blue

The above Sass yields the following css rules:


#header {
 position: relative;
 color: #2e6ab1;
 clear: both; }
 #header a {
   color: #2e6ab1; }
   #header a:hover {
     color: #e5f2f8; }

The benefit of separating the colors from the layout is that the long term plan is to allow for a much easier way to reskin the site by making minimal changes to layout.Sass and colors.Sass. For example, in the future colors.Sass may contain the following:


...
!input_border = #BBB
!default_border_color = #DDD
!link_color = #ABABAB
!link_hover_color = #EEE
!lighter_text_color = #666
!background_color = #2E6AB1
!accent_color = #BBDAFD
...

A separation of “lipstick” and “layout” will ease the ability to customize the Spree look, which is an essential for every implementation of Spree.

A final benefit with this round of Sass improvements was to take advantage of mixins, which allow you to define a set of CSS attributes and include them in any number of selectors as an inline rule. This goes along with the DRY notion – it’s much easier to manage a single css definition that is applied to many selectors. The mixins also accept arguments and can have a default argument value. Below is an example of a mixin definition with a default value:


= round_corners(!radius = 5px)
 :-moz-border-radius= !radius
 :-webkit-border-radius= !radius

The mixin is used in a selector, such as:


button
 +round_corners(0.3em)
 &.large
   +round_corners

The above example yields the following CSS:


button {
 -moz-border-radius: 0.3em;
 -webkit-border-radius: 0.3em;
}
button.large {
 -moz-border-radius: 4px;
 -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
}

Although at this point the Sass implementation does not introduce new skinning functionality, it certainly gets the Spree project moving in the right direction. Some future improvements include improving the ease of overriding Spree core colors as discussed above, improving the ease of overriding stylesheet rules or complete Sass components, and introducing a mechanism to include extension style rules in order to avoid having to include a separate stylesheet for every extension.

For more information on Compass and Sass, take a look at the Compass & Sass screencast.

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Posted @ 9:00am


Announcing the Spree Core Team

May 18 2009 by railsdog

I am pleased to announce the formation of an official Spree “Core Team.” The core team will be responsible for the continued maintenance and development of the Spree project, as well as assisting with our community building effort. The concept of a core team is not new – most open source projects have one (including Ruby on Rails.) The new core team members are: Brian Quinn (bdq), Paul Callaghan (paulcc) and Dale Hofkens (zzip/inifinitize).

There is also an important change to the Spree project in GitHub. The project can now be found at railsdog/spree instead of schof/spree. This shouldn’t impact too many people, since I just renamed my personal account and all of the forks and watchers should be intact. Your GitHub forks will continue to work properly but going forward you will want to clone/pull from the new repository location: git://github.com/railsdog/spree.git If you are tracking the old schof/master repository in GitHub you wil probably need to update your remote references.

For example inside of .git/config if you have a remote reference to schof you would want to change it as follows:



[remote "schof"]
        url = git://github.com/schof/spree.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/schof/*

should be changed to the following


[remote "railsdog"]
        url = git://github.com/railsdog/spree.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/railsdog/*

Please feel free to drop us a line on the Spree mailing list if you have any troubles with the move.

You may be wondering what has prompted this change. In the past several months we have seen an explosion of interest in (and contributions to) the Spree project. We are now in the enviable position of having more contributions then can be handled by a single person. Its important that these contributions be reviewed for code quality and possible implications for the Spree community as a whole. Instead of getting bogged down with delays I’ve decided to enlist the help of these three individuals who are going to help with code review and general project leadership. Each of the new core team members has shown an excellent ability to work together as a member of a team – something that is just as important as a person’s programming ability.

You may also be curious as to what this means for my involvement in the project. I personally plan to remain very active and involved in the Spree e-commerce project. I will still be coding and I’m going to continue answer emails and IRC questions when possible. Most importantly, I will continue to provide oversight of the project and making sure that we are not straying too far from the original vision. I’m personally very excited about this step, as it allows me to offload some of the project maintenance and the entire community reaps the benefit of a faster development and release cycle. We’ve already demonstrated that we can build a pretty sweet commerce platform without a bunch of venture capital. The core team now gives us a solid foundation as we take things to the next level.

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Posted @ 3:30am


Exciting Commerce Developments at RailsConf

May 9 2009 by railsdog

The Spree ecommerce project was on proud display at this years RailsConf and there were plenty of exciting new developments to talk about. End Point was there in full force with four of its employees in attendance. I’m pleased to report that many of the people we had talked to were already familiar with Spree. Those that had not heard of Spree seemed to be impresed with it upon learning more about it. We had pretty good attendance for our Spree BOF despite having to compete agains the Lightning Talks and the Penn and Teller show. It was great meeting several of our existing users as well as others who were hoping to learn more about Spree.

Fabio Akita did a lengthy interview with me about Spree on the second day of the conference which he already has posted. I haven’t listened to it yet but it was basically a discussion about the origins of the project and what makes Spree special as a commerce platform. The “Rails Envy” guys were kind enough to mention us during their Rails: A Year of Innovation talk. Carl and Yehuda both mentioned Spree during their talk on The Russian Doll Pattern: Mountable Apps in Rails 3. Mountable apps look extremely promising and they have important implications for projects such as Spree.

One of my main goals at this conference was to learn more about the exciting concept of mountable apps. Yahuda explained that in Rails 3, applications will be able to define “mount points” which define an informal sort of API that can be used to link applications together. In this way, applications such as Spree could be combined with other applications, such as Radiant, and they could even share common aspects such as login or admin panel. The ability to mount several apps together is a confirmed (and nearly completed) feature for Rails 3. The actual implementation of a commmon login and admin menu is being envisioned as a separate project outside of the Rails core. In fact, Yahuda and Carl have already started up a Google Group to discuss such a venture. Feel free to join in the discussion if this is something that interests you (and it should interest you if you are planning on doing a lot of Spree development in the future.)

One exciting announcement during the conference was that End Point is now offering dedicated Spree Hosting. They’re offering highly secure, pre-configured Linux boxes with all of the Spree software and dependencies installed and ready to go. My favorite aspect of this offering is the parallel development environment you get for free with dev camps. Personally I like this kind of service because it saves me the hassle – particularly when it comes to setting up log rotation, dedicated backups, nagios monitoring, etc.

RailsConf tends to provide leading indicators on what technologies will become a big deal in the following year. Last year everyone was talking about Phusion Passenger. This year, there is the same level of buzz (probably even more) surrounding Rack. I’ve recently discovered an excellent guide on this topic on the Rails site. Gregg Pollack also gave a very excellent explanation of Rack during his innovation talk (with video of this talk promised soon on Rails Envy. There was also a lot of talk about metric_fu which is a nice gem that combines a series of code metric modules into a single gem. We’ll be running this on the Spree project soon. I’m sure there’s lots of room for improvement.

RailsConf was a great time and definitely worthwhile. I was glad for the opportunity to get the word out on Spree and spend time with my coworkers. Even better then talking about Spree was listening about what other people were up to. After the conference we all had several exciting new ideas on how to improve Spree. You’ll be hearing more about these new ideas in the coming days.

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Posted @ 6:42pm


Announcing SpreeCamps.com hosting

May 5 2009 by railsdog

On day two of RailsConf 2009, End Point is pleased to announce our new SpreeCamps.com hosting service. SpreeCamps is the quickest way to get started developing your new e-commerce website with Ruby on Rails and Spree and easily deploy it into production.

You get the latest Spree 0.8.0 that was just released yesterday, as part of a fully configured environment built on the best industry-standard open-source software: CentOS, Ruby on Rails, your choice of PostgreSQL or MySQL, Apache, Passenger, Git, and DevCamps. Your system is harmonized and pre-installed on high-performance hardware, so you can simply sign up and start coding today.

SpreeCamps gives you a 64-bit virtual private server and include backups, your own preconfigured iptables firewall, ping and ssh monitoring, and DNS. We also include a benefit unheard of in the virtual private server space: Out of the box we enforce an SELinux security policy that protects you against many types of unforeseen security vulnerabilities, and is configured to work with Passenger, Rails, and Spree.

SpreeCamps’ built-in DevCamps system gives you development and staging environments that make it easy to work together in teams, show others your work in progress, and deploying your changes from development to production is as easy as “git pull”.

And the best part of all? You can sign up now for just $95 per month, with no setup charge. We also offer hands-on training and support for Spree, DevCamps, and any other part of your application. Visit SpreeCamps.com for more information or to sign up for your own SpreeCamp.

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Posted @ 10:49am


Spree 0.8.0 Released

May 4 2009 by railsdog

We’re kicking off the first day of RailsConf with the official release of Spree 0.8.0. This release is the result of two months of hard work and represents another major step forward for the Spree ecommerce platform. The most noticeable new feature is the massive redesign of the user interface (screenshots available.) Not only has the look of the interface improved, but we’ve switched from HTML tables to the more readable CSS-based approach. We’re also now using the very powerful Sass library to simplify stylesheets along with the Compass gem which provides a Sass implementation of the popular Blueprint CSS framework.

This new release is also using the very excellent authlogic gem to hand authentication and authorization. This has resulted in some immediate improvements, such as “forgot my password” links and more secure password encryption. It will also make it easier to provide more advanced security features in the future. Ryan Bates has just released a very timely screencast describing some of the hotness this gem provides. Existing Spree user accounts will work fine with this new scheme but of course you should do a full backup of your system (particularly the database) before upgrading.

Spree also now supports Rails 2.3.2. We’ve actually had this support for some time now but its been limitted to “edge” users. This is the first official Spree release with Rails 2.3.2 support. Spree is committed to staying current with the latest versions of Rails and we’ll be working towards Rails 3.0 support in the comming months. Ruby 1.9 is not yet supported but this will be on our short list after Railsconf.

This release is packed with new features. Here are some additional highlights:

  • Guest checkout
  • Expanded functionality for product prototypes
  • Improved upgrade rake task
  • Meta data keywords and description fields for products
  • Improved order security using tokens

This release has been a long time in the making and several people in our community need to be thanked. David North and Wynn Netherland for their tireless efforts on the interface redesign. Steph Powell also provided considerable CSS expertise and helped us to polish the new design. Both Steph and Paul Callagahan provided crucial last minute troubleshooting for several IE issues. Dale Hofkens should also be thanked for doing a ton of work to get Spree working with authlogic. We had so many contributions to this release that it would be impossible to name them all. So thanks to all of you for your continued interest and support of the Spree ecommerce project.

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Posted @ 5:35am