+ A Rails App for your Wedding +
++ Here's a simple rails app for distributing wedding information and managing the guest list. You're probably going to build your own anyway (like me!) but this may be a useful place to start. +
+
+ Get the Code
+
++ +THIS WEBSITE IS AWESOME! Best wedding invite ever.
+ +
Features
+-
+
- Guests can RSVP, including dietary requirements and plus ones +
- Guests can manage their own RSVPs using a secret link in an email (no user name / password needed) +
- Responsive design on home page and RSVP pages +
- Customizable styling (with Bootstrap) and wording +
- Active Admin interface to manage the attendee list +
- Optional invisible Google reCAPTCHA integration to avoid spam +
- Sets headers to avoid being indexed by search engines +
What does it look like?
+For the demo, the wedding is South Pole themed. You can of course change that! Click to expand the image.
+
+
+ 
+
+
How does it work?
++ Here's a map of all the flows through the app, from the home page to the RSVP flow and also some of the separate admin interface. + Click to expand the image. + And here is a higher-resolution PDF version. +
+
+
+ 
+
+
This diagram was produced in Realtime Board. + +
Reflections
++ Building this website was fun and an excellent wedding procrastination project. + Overall it was well-received, and a few people asked me to make it open source so they could use it for other weddings or wedding-like events. +
++ It's a fairly simple CRUD application, so rails provides an excellent foundation. + It's very much a “vanilla” rails application, with almost no fancy JavaScript. + An earlier version used some UJS for Plus One management but getting it to be robust and accessible proved to be quite a lot of work, so I opted for the simpler approach. + It does make good use of the rails asset pipeline to build a custom bootstrap theme. +
++ I mainly wanted full control over the RSVP fields, for example to ask for song suggestions, and also for guests to be able to manage their own RSVPs. + Quite a few people did this, especially for the song suggestions, many of which came in at the last minute! + One person registered with two different email addresses and had to be sorted out manually, but overall people seemed to make it through the flow OK. +
++ I put together some Docker compose infrastructure to manage the development environment, and in production I hosted the project on Heroku behind Cloudflare. + I used hobby dynos for $7/mo to make sure it didn't cause confusion by going to sleep, and also to get SSL. + I probably could have hosted it just on Heroku, but Cloudflare provided some nice analytics and a bit of added assurance on the security side (and some caching that works nicely with the rails asset pipeline, to boot). + It was interesting to see that within a few minutes of putting it up, we had lots of traffic from China and eastern Europe. + Google reCAPTCHAs were quickly added, especially because I used my personal Google Mail SMTP to send email. + Fortunately, we didn't have any spam trouble. +
++ We did eventually take the data offline to code the dietary requirements for the caterer and to make the seating plan. + Potentially we could have asked people to select dietary requirements from a dropdown to avoid this, but we didn't know in advance what categories our caterer would want; it took some manual back and forth, but we got there in the end. + There was some manual updating of these two sources of truth in the last couple of weeks, but it wasn't much, and by that point I didn't have time to add a seating planner to the website! +
++ I hope this at least provides some ideas for your wedding website, and maybe a good starting point. + I've also put some links to other rails wedding websites in the README on GitHub. +
+
+ Get Started
+