Making some good progress on sowedu's MVP this weekend thanks to a couple long nights coding. Should have something presentable by tomorrow afternoon.
In the process, I'm learning a lot about Ruby and Rails. My code is a nightmare at this point, but it's amazing how easy it is to string stuff together and get a workable product. The fun will be sorting everything out once I start refactoring.
Fortunately, Rails forces enough of a construct on you that (1) you have to follow a minimal set of standards to make the app work and (2) everything has a place, which makes bugs straightforward to track down (compared to my previous experience in PHP).