Content management systems in Ruby -- where are they at in 2013?
January 18, 2013 10:48 AM   Subscribe

I'm interested in using a Ruby CMS as a substitute for the usual Wordpress or Drupal. Although I know my way around Rails, I am not sure whether there might be a good off-the-shelf way to make the control panel as easy to use for regular folks who are not programmers.

I know there are some gems with pre-fab admin panels and stuff like that. And I've looked around at some of the screenshots of Refinery and Locomotive and similar systems. I am wondering which is the furthest along in development and what the best way to go would be for a large organization with a small budget and short deadline.

Mostly, I wonder if anyone out there has had any good experiences using these as substitutes for, say, Drupal? I'm conflicted because while Drupal tends to be preferred by the kinds of organizations I want to work with -- and I even have a soft spot for its arcane PHP hooks -- I'd like to see if it is possible to reach the same ends in Ruby.

The customers comes first, though, and I would hate to annoy them by putting my computer science interests ahead of easy dashboard controls.

I talked to a guy recently who said he tried to make his own Wordpress clone in Ruby and went running back to it after he realized he had failed to appreciate how many wonderful things it does for you.

Anyhow, has anyone ever used one of these Ruby on Rails CMSes for a pretty big website and found it a good substitute for the popular PHP ones?
posted by steinsaltz to Computers & Internet (3 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
They're rare, but a couplefew have continued to be maintained. The thing with Rails is, given an adequate skill level, why spend time learning your way around someone else's project when you could be creating a purpose-built one for whatever you need it for? This doesn't speak to those in the Drupal/WP community who slap together sites for many clients, one after the other, but that's a pretty orthogonal world from the majority of Rails work out there.
posted by rhizome at 10:59 AM on January 18, 2013


Response by poster: Thanks. I guess I should add, I would be up for programming a custom-made CMS for the task, except that I'm always worried that the limited time or budget will not allow the development of something good and tested enough.
posted by steinsaltz at 11:10 AM on January 18, 2013


Rhizome's link pretty much covers the off-the-shelf options, but when I reviewed them they all seemed too all-encompasing (bad at integrating with an existing site) for my needs. Instead, I've been combining rails_admin with a custom frontend to some success.
posted by tsmo at 11:25 AM on January 18, 2013


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