Backport improvements from ETDplus development

Created by: pmather

These changes are in tandem with the changes to the InstallScripts repository that incorporate improvements from development on the ETDplus project.

Because we are no longer doing a "rails new" during install, we must ensure we have certain necessary directories. The existing .gitignore means we do not have a log directory when cloning the application code. This causes rake tasks to fail because they can't log within their RAILS_ENV environment.