RoR Joomla equivilant

rubyonrails-talk
1

Hi,

I've recently begun trying to get to grips with RoR. The other day however I was shown Joomla. Is there a RoR alternative a group developing a similar CMS.

Thanks

2

So it is realistically possible to write something similar to joomla as an individual once one has a reasonably good understanding of rails?

3

Undoubtably yes, and maybe even improve on some of the concepts of joomla. It would take a substantial amount of time, that’s for sure, but it can be done.

Best regards

Peter De Berdt

4

You might want to check out RadiantCMS at http://www.radiantcms.org

It's a very cool CMS.

5

RadiantCMS is nowhere near being in the same league as most of the CMS tools out there for other platforms. I don't know what I'm missing, but it seems to me like it's a very lightweight blogging tool (which is, as it is, a lightweight CMS). I'm sure there will be future versions with a LOT more functionality, but right now I think it's far too light on features to be mentioned as an alternative to Joomla. Namely, true layout and content management. Sucking in tags and other HTML elements, running it through a couple of filters and storing it is NOT content management. One of the broads in accounting wouldn't have a hope in hell of managing content with this :).

But if you really need a good, powerful, and simplified blogging tool, use typo.

6

It's no surprise that Rails CMS offerings aren't as robust as other platforms. For one thing, most of those projects are much older than Rails itself. But more importantly Rails is in many ways the anti- thesis of CMS systems. Rails is all about making custom development as smooth as possible, but the core team does not believe in component- based development. The difference is that with Rails you do more work to create basic functionality, but it looks and works EXACTLY as you intend. Whereas with packaged CMSes, they do a million things out of the box, but if you need to customize them in unsupported ways you may quickly find the time requirements growing exponentially.

My favorite CMS is Drupal. It has an extremely robust API and hook system for interacting with myriad modules. If you need a large amount of boilerplate functionality with a smaller amount of custom code it's a perfect solution. It's a very impressive system to work within, but it requires a lot of infrastructure and assumptions that may not be ideal for a given project. However I keep in my toolbelt, because a $2000 Drupal site that has a less-than-optimal interface but a lot of features is often preferable to a $50,000 Rails site with every interaction aspect carefully designed and optimized.

I don't understand why someone would want to run a general purpose Rails CMS. To me the whole point of Rails is custom apps. You'll notice the Rails CMS offerings tend to be light, elegant and easy to modify. I think a successful monolithic CMS would require pretty heavy modifications to Rails core, to the point where it would probably be it's own Ruby project. Maybe borrowing some pieces (ActiveRecord), but it would require the notion of a module beyond what plugins currently offer. The question is, who in the Rails community has interest in such a thing?