Rails 3: routing to customer areas

Question

I'm a Rails 3 beginner, but have experiences with other MVC web frameworks and need a starting hint about how to setup my routing in Rails. The application should allow users to register and after that the users data should be available at URLs like:

http://domainname/username/xyz

The common and user independent part should be available at

http://domainname/abc

To distinguis between both routes, I would force usernames to have at least 6 characters and all "abc"-routes will have 5 or less. Until this point I would be manage the routing by myself, but for the "xyz" part of the user area I would like to use the existing REST full features of rails. Any hint how to do that?

Answer 1

Have you already read http://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/routing.html?

It's really a good resource for this sort of question. I believe some of the scheme you describe falls into the "Non-Resourceful" routing category.