So today we’re releasing our open source BPOINT plugin for ActiveMerchant. Installation instructions and usage are available at the GitHub project page: https://github.com/Sentia/activemerchant-bpoint.

It’s very simple to setup and use, good luck and enjoy.

So there is a Beta 2 out now which l promptly downloaded and fire it up. Now l have to say that its fantastic. Its super fast and easy to use. Sure its missing some of the little things that Textmate has that makes life easy such as the rails bundles etc but you can actually download and install ported bundles from textmate that users have ported across.

The UI is clean and simple to use and the fact that you can change almost every setting in the app and also with the full screen feature its hard to beat.

The search is the best feature hands down. Its super fast and simple to use and you never get caught again hitting apple + T and find out later that you have typed some of your search letters into a random ruby file you had open at the time.

Here are some screen shots of how clean the UI is in full screen mode and the search tool

p.s One thing that you will be missing is the

mate .

Command but not to worry simply add the following

alias sub='open -a "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app"'

to your .bashrc or .profile file and you can open projects the same you would have in textmate in sublime but with the following command

sub .

Also worth the license is cross platform so no more buying multiple licenses.

So be sure to check it out at One Big Switch

For more info check out the user group here

If anyone else knows of some other ones please let me know

== General Practices ==
Dev on a Mac
Read up on TDD (Test Driven Development)
Use Growl for your Autotest notifications
TextMate – The only Editor you need
GitHub – Great space to see open source code and gems and plugins
http://gemcutter.org/

== Rails Setup ==

http://hivelogic.com/ – Has some great tutorials on getting your environment setup on a mac.

== Tutorials ==
http://rubyonrails.org
Rails Casts – Ryan Bates screen casts about all things rails related
PeepCode – Great screen casts about all things rails related

== Blogs ==

Sentia Blog
http://thoughtbot.com
http://weblog.jamisbuck.org
http://blog.jayfields.com
http://errtheblog.com

== Books ==
http://pragmaticstudio.com – Great source of books about rails and other technologies with a focus on the right practices.

Finally the only real way to learn is to try things out. Follow other developers blogs and use all the resources you can such as Google groups etc.
Don’t be scared to get it wrong its the only way to learn.

PayFlow is Paypal’s payment gateway and you need to setup a PayFlow account.
IMPORTANT! This is separate from Paypal’s development sandbox. Follow these steps to setup a Payflow testing account

1. Go to https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_payflow-get-started-outside
   and fill in the details for an account.
2. When you get to the page where you need to enter your payment information, hit Save and Exit. This will create a testing PayFlow account for you.
3. You will be sent an email with your partner ID and your vendor login. Take note of your partner ID as this will be important later.
4. You should now be able to login at https://manager.paypal.com/

Now that you have a PayFlow account, you can use ActiveMerchant to setup payments. For now we will muck around in irb to test that methods out.

So lets open up irb and start by including the active merchant gem and setting ActiveMerchant to test mode

kongy@Deadpool: $ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
irb(main):002:0> require 'active_merchant'
irb(main):003:0> ActiveMerchant::Billing::Base.mode = :test

Now lets setup the gateway.

gateway = ActiveMerchant::Billing::PayflowGateway.new(:login => 'PAYFLOW_LOGIN', :password => 'PAYFLOW_PASSWORD', :partner => 'PARTNER_ID')

This creates the gateway that we will be using to request purchases. By default ActiveMerchant passes PAYPAL as the partner value if you leave it out. I believe that this is the default for US PayFlow account. For my Aussie one, I received a VSA partner_id. I would suggest putting it in there anyway.

PayFlow Testing only accepts testing credit cards numbers.  You can grab them from the PayFlow recurring billing documentation found here. Here is a quick list which I can’t guarantee will be up to date.

So lets create a Mastercard credit card.

irb(main):004:0> credit_card = ActiveMerchant::Billing::CreditCard.new( :number => '5105105105105100', :month => '9', :year => '2007', :first_name => 'Mal', :last_name => 'Reynolds', :verification_value => '123', :type => 'master' )

Now we are ready to start billing. If you want to setup a one time payment it is quite easy.

irb(main):007:0> response = gateway.purchase(1000, credit_card)
irb(main):008:0> response.success?
=> true

If you go into your Paypal Manager and search for transactions you should see it appear.

To setup a recurring billing we need to use the recurring method of the gateway. The recurring method accepts the amount in cents, the credit card object and the time intervals to charge the card, at a minimum. There are other options available which you can find here. Lets charge $10/month

irb(main):009:0> response = gateway.recurring(100, credit_card, :periodicity => :monthly)
irb(main):010:0> response.success?
=> true
irb(main):011:0> response.profile_id
=> "RT0000000002"

You can view the recurring billings in your Paypal Manager by clicking on Service Settings > Recurring Billings > Manage Profiles. You will probably want to store the profile_id in your database for when you need to edit details of the recurring billing. You can do it quite simply by calling the recurring method again. Let’s change the amount we want to bill to $20/week.

irb(main):0012:0> response = gateway.recurring(2000, nil, :profile_id => "RT0000000001",  :periodicity => :weekly)
irb(main):013:0> response.success?
=> true

You can see here that we no longer need to pass in the credit card since we have the profile_id. We update the amount, and change the periodicity of the billing.

And that’s it.

So thats what we are going to do for this example.

Step 1. Create your admin controller

You can use whichever process works best for you, but for this we are going to use script/generate:

 ./script/generate controller admin

Step 2. Create your user controller

You can use whichever process works best for you, but for this we are going to use script/generate:

 ./script/generate controller admin/users

Step 3. Check to ensure proper inheritance

The nested users controller should look something like so:

class Admin::UsersController < ApplicationController
end

Step 4. Create the Routes

The nested users controller should look something like so:

map.namespace :admin do |admin|
  admin.resources :users
end

Before rails 2+ you had to do like like we have below. Personally l don’t mind it makes it a little easier to read but either option works fine

map.resource(:admin) do |admin|
  admin.resources(:users, :controller => 'admin/users')
end

Step 5. Wait there is no step 5 your done

Now when you need to link to any of these actions its very simple keeping in mind that users is nested under the admin controller so all you have to do to create a link that goes to the index action on the nested users controller is add the admin prefix before

 link_to "Users", admin_users_url

The same applies when you are wanting to link to the show action of users all you do is loose the “s” on users as you would normally

 link_to "View User", admin_user_url(@user)

You can see a list of all the routes you have available to you by going to the root directory of your project in terminal and typing

rake routes

sudo gem install passenger

Then you need to install the apache module for passenger.

sudo passenger-install-apache2-module

Now once you do this you will be told to all the following lines to your httpd.conf file in apache. Now you can just add these lines no problems but l like to have it in its own conf file and since apache will also load all conf files in /etc/apache2/other/ directory just create a passenger.conf file and add those lines in. Now these lines are different depending on how you installed ruby. I installed it in user/local keeping the orginal ruby version that ships with mac clean so mine looks like so

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.5
PassengerRuby /usr/local/bin/ruby

To create the new passenger.conf file just run the below command assuming you have textmate installed.

mate /etc/apache2/other/passenger.conf

Once you have cut and pasted those lines in save it and close the file. You then need to download the passenger preference pane. Here is a link to the latest build passenger-preference-pane1.3. Download and install then fire it up.

Now unlock it if need be and click on the + button to add a new site. A window will pop up and now just select the root of your rails app and click “open”. You can now change the address if need be but just defaults to (rails_app_name).local. Hit apply and your good to go.

So go back to your browser and type in that address and it will fire up and your up and running. Now you wont see the log like you are used to since your not running webrick etc but all you have to do is tail the development log by going to the root dir of your application in terminal and typing the following

 tail -f log/development.log

And that’s it. You will need to restart passenger if you change the environment.rb file but thats simple enough via the preference pane. So no more ./script/server yay

/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — capistrano/ext/multistage (LoadError)

So to fix this l did the following

sudo gem uninstall capistrano
sudo rm -rf /usr/bin/cap
sudo gem install capistrano-ext
sudo gem install capistrano

Needed to do “sudo rm -rf /usr/bin/cap” as doing just the uninstall of capistrano didn’t remove all the files l needed it to.

Firstly create your rails app and using terminal go into the root of that project.

Then create a top, project-level .gitignore file. I use textmate so this can be done like so

$ mate .gitignore

Then add the following to the .gitignore file

.DS_Store
log/*.log
tmp/**/*
config/database.yml
db/*.sqlite3

You can also add more directories or files in here to ignore like css files if using sass for example, or your uploads directory.

Create some .gitignore files so the empty directories get tracked:

$ touch log/.gitignore
$ touch tmp/.gitignore

and finally commit that bad boy

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "First commit"

Running git add will tell git to track all the new files (Since first commit thats all of them). The commit will commit to your local Git repository and all that is left to do would be to add it to GitHub for example and your in business.