Question

How would I be able to make a signup page with ruby on rails?

Like, I have a beta page and a user enters their email address and then I can add it to the database.

Also, I could send them an email confirming their signup

EDIT: I want something real simple. Like, just plain adding a row in a database simple. I don’t need a password box and a username box because that just further complicates things. I’m a beginner so I like to have things simple.

Answer 1

This is the kind of thing that is very easy to do in Rails and you shouldn’t need any extra gems. Here are the steps you will need to do:

• Use a migration to create a model (i.e. database table) called Signup with a string field called “email”.
• Create an action that can be called with a “GET” request. This action will return the sign up form.
• Create the view that serves as the signup form. It should have an HTML form element (<form method="POST">...</form>) that contains a text box (<input type="text" .../>) in it and a submit button (<input type="submit" />). Rails has all sorts of helper methods that will help you make those HTML tags, but you don’t have to use them if you don’t want to.
• Create an action that can be called with a “POST” request that processes the form and adds the info to the database.

The action can be very simple:

def create_signup
  Signups.create! :email => params[:email]
end

Does this make sense? Now that I have given you the general guide, you should be able to ask new questions that are more focussed on specific parts that you don’t know how to do. You should also search the web because there are probably tutorials available for all of these steps.