Choosing RoR or CMS for a customer which wants to customize

rubyonrails-talk
1

You are in luck my friend!

Take a look at Radiant (http://radiantcms.org). It gives you the best of both worlds: a CMS written in Rails that you can extend all you want with custom functionality.

Jamey

2

Thanks for your kind answer,

Just to understand in theory - When I use a regular CMS, I can't really control the pages the way I like, or build my site framework nor my database, as I am used to when building a regular app. Is radiant CMS different? Could I create pages independently using my favorite RoR IDE, and use radiant just to enjoy extensions and browser customizations? Does it store pages on database like joomla which is a major downgrade for me, or does it allow creating real html(.erb) pages?? Thank you, Oran

3

It's kind of the other way around...

Radiant *is* a Rails app, and, yes, it stores its pages in the db. But, you can write extensions, which are kind of like plugins, which is just like writing a rails app, meaning you have models, controllers, and views. And you can integrate these extensions into your Radiant instance, so that, to the end-user, it is all seemless. There are already a bunch of extensions that have been written that you can use, or you can write your own.

I would suggest going to the radiant wiki on github and checking out some of the documentation.

Jamey

4

Thank you,

I have just briefly looked into radiant. Although looks promising, yet i see that there is no WYSIWYG editor, and seems to yet lack many of the functionality Joomla contains.

There is a very nice HTML editor called FCKEDITOR which is commonly used by developpers. Would you know if it possible to integrate with RoR in a way a customer could actually change pages on a RoR site using it?

Thanks, Oran

5

I'm pretty sure there are Radiant extensions that let you use fckeditor, tinymce, or wymeditor.

It's true that Joomla is more mature, but as soon as you have to do any customizing, the beauty of Radiant is that you simply start writing Rails code. With Joomla, you have to use PHP.

6

+1 for Radiant CMS. It's super easy to extend and there's a lot of existing extensions too. WYSIWYG / WYSIWYM is one of them.

7

Roderick van Domburg wrote:

+1 for Radiant CMS. It's super easy to extend and there's a lot of existing extensions too. WYSIWYG / WYSIWYM is one of them.   

+1 (and a great community!)

Cheers, Mohit. 6/26/2009 | 7:09 PM.