In Announcements on
10 February 2010 with no comments
If you’re into e-commerce, like I am, you’ve probably heard of Shopify. Shopify is a fantastic hosted e-commerce solution for store owners who want to quickly put up great-looking storefronts to sell their products. In fact, I like Shopify so much, that it is the first recommendation to potential clients who come to me looking for me to build a custom storefront for them. For most people, Shopify fills the bill quite nicely, and is a much cheaper option than me. 
Since I’m such a fan of Shopify, I was thrilled when Jesse Storimer approached me about releasing a Rails Kit that would help Rails developers build a Shopify application for the Shopify Platform, a platform for developers to offer apps that can extend the functionality of Shopify for store owners. Jesse proposed offering a ready-made application that shows you just how easy it is to hook into Shopify-hosted stores and use the Shopify-powered billing system. And Jesse has done a bang-up job!
Check out the newest addition to the Rails Kits family — the Shopify App Rails Kit. It’s an insanely easy way to build a SaaS application targeted at people who are already using Shopify to sell their products. You get authentication, billing, and access to your customers’ Shopify data, all throught the Shopify API, and you get help with marketing your app via the Shopify Application Store. It has never been easier to get your web app into the hands of paying customers, so try the Shopify App Rails Kit today!
In Announcements on
30 June 2009 with Comments Off
I announced the Helpdesk Kit on my personal blog, but I wanted to announce an update to that Kit here. Since it’s initial release, the Helpdesk Kit has had a feature added that a high-traffic sites will find especially helpful: Issues.
When an email comes in to your support alias, or when one of your customers enters a support request via your web form, a ticket is created with the user’s info and the details of their support request. If you get a lot of users submitting support requests all about the same problem (say you are running a Facebook application, you just broke something, and 100 people file tickets on it at the same time), then you may find yourself buried in a sea of tickets. If you can fix all the problems with one code update, why not be able to close all the support tickets for that problem with one update, too?
With the new issues feature of the Helpdesk Rails Kit you can. Now you can assign any number of tickets to an issue, and when you make updates to that issue, everyone who filed a ticket that is now associated with that issue get the update. Now you can fix your broken feature, deploy an update, and close all the tickets at once, letting all your effected customers know that the problem has been solved. You get to save yourself your time, and each of your customers still gets a personalized response.
If you haven’t already checked out the Helpdesk Kit, now is a great time to do it. For the price of a single user license for some other support system applications, you get an unlimited license to a Rails-based support system that you can optionally integrate directly into your existing Ruby on Rails application.
In Announcements on
4 September 2008 with 1 comment
I’m happy to announce the arrival of the Map Rails Kit — a full Rails application that implements the Google Maps API. Now you don’t have to worry about cobbling together various out-dated javascript examples, or even reading the Google docs for geocoding. Now you can just take this Kit, create markers in the database with whatever addresses you want to map, and all the hard work will be done for you. It’s cool stuff!
Check it out, and get your mapping on!
I’m also delighted to announce that this is the first Rails Kit authored by someone other than me! Jacques Crocker has done all the heavy lifting on this one, and he’s done a bang-up job. Jacques was one of the first customers for the SaaS Rails Kit, so it’s been doubly enjoyable to work with him on this Kit.
If you’d like to publish a Kit at Rails Kits, feel free to get in touch. Or, if you just have an idea for Kit, and you’d like me to build it, let me know about that, too.
In Announcements on
7 August 2008 with Comments Off
If you are looking to create a content side with a paid membership component, you’re in luck — the new CMS Rails Kit has you covered. An extension to the popular Radiant Content Management System built using Ruby on Rails, the CMS Rails Kit makes it easy for you to charge users on a recurring basis for access to your content-based web site.
With this Kit you get support for multiple tiers of access, periodic billing, and user account self-signup and cancellation. The Kit hooks into the Radiant administration interface, so restricting your content to only paid members is as simple as clicking a checkbox when editing a page.
You can also set the pricing to be free, in case you don’t want to charge for your content but you do want to restrict it to only people who have registered at your site.
To get a quick start on building a membership site with paid content using Ruby on Rails, check out the CMS Rails Kit now!
In Announcements on
17 July 2008 with Comments Off
I am delighted to announce that the SaaS Rails Kit now supports the Authorize.net payment gateway with their CIM offering. Supporting this gateway has been a much-requested feature, and now it is that much easier to get your new subscription-based web application up and running.
Connecting to the Authorize.net payment gateway is as easy as any of the other supported gateways. Once you have your Authorize.net account with CIM activated, simply drop in the API login credentials into the gateway configuration file, specify the authorize_net_cim gateway in the application configuration file, and start the sample application. You’ll then be up and running with a bare-bones Rails application that can handle self-service account creations, upgrades and downgrades, the collecting of payment information, and automated recurring billing.
