Ruby on Rails® for Microsoft Developers

5.14. Summary

Now your blog looks sufficiently presentable. There are still a few missing features though, before you can rightfully consider it a full-fledged simple blog:

1. You lack pagination. If your blog had 50 currently published articles, all of them would appear on the front page. I like the idea of having only one post on the front page (or if you wish, more) and being able to click a navigation menu to see the previous posts.

2. Some blogs opt not to have comments enabled, but in your blog you'll allow them and this provides the opportunity to introduce a few more Rails concepts.

3. Any respectable blog should allow content syndication; hence you need to add an RSS and Atom feed.

4. You should throw in a bit of Ajax in order to provide a more responsive experience when using your application.

In the next chapter you address the first two points, adding pagination and comments to your blog. In Chapter 8 you evaluate a few options for easily adding authentication and authorization to the application, and in Chapter 9 you add RSS and Atom feeds, as well as throwing in a sprinkle of Ajax.

What's key is that you are doing incremental development, so as new concepts are explained in the coming chapters, you'll add a few features to the application when doing so fits.