Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > email signup/splash page

Does anyone know the easiest way to put up a splash page where people 
can
add their email addresses to be notified when the site is ready?  I want
regular visitors to be directed to this page.  How can i have this and 
still
be able to test/develop the site?

I know a lot of web apps do this while still developing, so i'm looking 
for
a solution that i'm sure exists, but i cant seem to find it.


Thanks in advance.

On 3/8/06, Manish Shah <mnshah@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does anyone know the easiest way to put up a splash page where people can
> add their email addresses to be notified when the site is ready?  I want
> regular visitors to be directed to this page.
>

I would create a "signups" model with email_address and maybe a date 
field,
to start. Then a "signup" controller with action "index". You can set 
your
environment to point to this controller & action at the root of the 
site.

How can i have this and still be able to test/develop the site?
>

I've seen two different approaches, usually in some combination:
* "Develop locally, publish globally": Publish the basic sign-up page to
your server, then stop. Run WebBrick on your development machine.
Test/develop locally all you want, just don't send any more to the 
server
until it's ready for primetime.

* "You have to know what's there": Put everything on the server, but 
send
mynewsite.com to your signup page. You then surf past the front page, to
mynewsite.com/controllername/action or whatever. You may want to use a
filter to force login on those, too.




- Joshua

I've used Josh's suggestion, which works great, but am also starting to 
use
a simple Campaign Monitor subscribe list.  It's really easy, and you get 
all
of your people in the system so you can send a blast when you launch.

Just in case someone else stumbles across this post like I did, I still 
didn't really want to use my own code to do this, so I searched a bit 
and found http://launchsplash.com which does exactly this.  Free for 2 
domains, $5/month for more than that.

I'm not affiliated with them.  Just hoping to help.