new to rails... suitable for what I wanna do?

Hi, I have created and now maintain the website ratsdeville.com (http:// ratsdeville.com/index_e.html for english) for my brother. He creates more and more content for it each week and I'm seriously feeling the pain now archiving everything manually and making sure that links works once items are archived (which I lost control of).

Like you can see, it is basically a news site about art expos and people in Montreal. Several sections gets updated on a regular basis (this week, culture, art) and the rest is mostly static. I need each of this section to show only the most recent items but I also need a way to find the older items.

Would rails make a nice solution for me? I know some Perl that I learned by doing bioinformatics. I wanna learn an object oriented language and Ruby seems very nice. I can handle Postgresql, I know Linux very well. If rails is a solution, I would probably have my own server running ubunu/mongrel/rails.

Thanks, carl

It can’t hurt to give it a try. The book “Agile Web Development with Rails” is a great introduction and will show you how to build a basic online store. You could take what you learn from that and expand upon it to do what you’re doing. See http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/rails/ for more on that.

If you’re not that keen on learning how to program, you could investigate one of the many content management systems out there. Radiant is a very nice Rails one… see http://radiantcms.org/ for more details.

There are others out there too. Some people even use Wordpress, a PHP blogging solution, as a CMS.

Hope that helps!

Blog would not be enough, I need lots of space (many many images) and total control on layout. Trying to know if RoR is overkill is my point here…

Thanks a lot, radiantcms looks very nice!

Thanks a lot, radiantcms looks very nice!

Or even Mephisto (http://mephistoblog.com/) might be an option, far more than just a blogging tool...