Unveiling Revolution Pages

With the official launch, we're pleased to unveil the beta of codename "fabric"—the "Revolution Pages" platform. Our users will create 'long tail' topic-oriented pages that will help other users find resources on both the arcane and the mundane. The premise is that a page on 'Chemotherapy in Des Moines' could be inherently more interesting/useful than a page on 'Cancer'.

We believe that this application really shows off the capabilities of our home-grown Ruby portal server. Within our portal, most resources are implemented as 'modules' (and any un-modularized blocks of functionality are quickly being converted.) Fabric is simply a layer of client-side functionality (i.e. a boatload of javascript) that sits on top of our existing rendering/page composition capabilities.

Fabric provides the following capabilities:

1. The ability to 'clip' any module on the site into your private clipboard. Try it for yourself—register, then visit any page on the site (try healthy living or conditions for target-rich environments) and click on the scissors (in the upper right, with the page tools.) The modules that are clippable will illuminate.

Demo:

2. The ability to syndicate most modules on the site (the capability exists for all, but we don't syndicate everything for a variety of reasons.) Enter clipping mode and hit syndicate instead—you'll be given a chunk of javascript to paste into your website/blog/etc.

3. The ability to perform full-text search against every module that has ever been rendered on the portal (with a few exceptions where we explicitly choose not to ingest.) This means that not only can we surface pages based on full text, but we can also surface individual components of a page independently. We're using the power of SOLR via acts_as_solr (along with some stomp) for this, and it came out really clean. Props to the SOLR guys (expect some acts_as_solr enhancement patches + commentary on this topic shortly.)

Demo:

4. The ability to build pages using modules gathered via #1 and #3, with a few 'special' modules that bring in external resources (RSS feeds, rich text editor, image upload, YouTube, etc.) We even give you two means to lay out pages—columns and float. For the technical audience, think static vs. absolutely positioned. In float mode, you get Photoshop style snaplines; enable columns and you get 'straightjacketed' slots.

5. The ability to browse pages built via #4, either by full-text search or tag selection.


We developed some interesting client-side techniques to pull this off, and we'll be releasing some of the more generic stuff eventually.

Feel free to poke around and create a page for yourself:

http://www.revolutionhealth.com/fabric

Watch the full demo (still under development):

Recommended Browsers: FF 2.0, IE 7.0
Supported Browsers: Recommended browsers + IE 6
Potentially reasonable, but unsupported: Late versions of Opera, Webkit, Safari