Contribution Manager. A Rails charity application

June 13th, 2007

A UK internet consultant I know, Allen Brown, has just released his first Ruby On Rails Application. Contribution Manager allows UK charities to track contributions and assists in making claims.

I had a chat to Allen about releasing his first Rails application:

Tell me a little about contribution manager?

It’s intended to help small charities collect the money they are entitled to claim back from the government. Estimates of the amount that went unclaimed last year range between £700M and £800M and I suspect the usual reason is that is just looks too complex. Contribution Manager makes it quite straightforward, generating the claim form for you and keeping track of all the details necessary to keep the tax man happy.

What made you want to develop contribution manager?

My business partner (also happens to be my wife) was doing the Gift Aid admin for a large church in London and convinced me to replace her old single-user Access database with a shiny new Ajax-enabled SQL-powered website. I made it very flexible – as Rails encourages such practices – and I soon realised that the solution would work for any small charity.

Which hosting solution did you plug for?

I was relatively early to Rails and quickly threw in my lot with those nice people at Textdrive. They are now Joyent.

Did they do a good job?

They are Rails experts but the support isn’t always as responsive as I’d like. However, the site was very reliable and quick once I mastered Lighttpd.

Who built it for you? How was you/their experience of using it?

I built it myself. It was my first Rails project. Rails is a fantastic framework and there’s no doubt that you can easily save yourself a couple of days by doing something automagically with a few lines of code. The problem I find is that the documentation is still in its infancy and you can lose those two days again trying to track down something that isn’t happening automagically when you want it to – or is when you don’t.

How much money did contribution manager take to set up?

Joyent bills me $15 a month and the domain costs me $9 a year. Oh yes, and the image of a piggy bank cost $1 from Fotolia. The rest was just manpower. My manpower to be specific. I did pay out quite a lot for a bespoke web design that I later largely abandoned but I’ve learnt from that experience and would buy myself a $50 template next time and modify it as I needed.

So there you go, I think Allen’s story says you don’t need to be a rockstar rails programmer or need plenty of cash to release your application

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