Rails - Jul 2006 - Personalised website user account

Apologies for the rather lame Subject title. I''m developing a new CMS 
and want to be able to allow people who sign up to create their own user 
account as follows: http://USERNAME.domainname.co.uk

I would be very grateful if anyone has any ideas or working examples of 
how to do this on account signup. I have seen websites like fluxiom.com 
do something similar. Or indeed if there are other magic ways of doing 
something similar to this.

Basically, once users create their account, they will see the website 
homepage along with some user specific links at their own address 
http://USERNAME.domainname.com. The idea being to make them feel special 
with their own user account page. :)


Thank you.
Neil.

-- 
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On Jul 26, 2006, at 3:31 AM, Neil Bradley wrote:
> Apologies for the rather lame Subject title. I''m developing a new
CMS
> and want to be able to allow people who sign up to create their own 
> user
> account as follows: http://USERNAME.domainname.co.uk
You''ll need a wildcard DNS in order to direct all those new names to 
your webserver; i.e. *.domainname.co.uk -> www.domainname.co.uk.

The front-end webserver will need to accept by wildcard too; if you''re 
using Apache you can do this with a similar directive; ServerName 
*.domainname.co.uk

Then your controllers need to look at the HTTP request that has been 
made to work out which USERNAME is coming in, perhaps in request_uri 
... perhaps a before_filter to extract the name and present it in an 
instance variable?

-jim