RailFrog / CMS Ridin’ on Rails: Here’s the first Rails CMS…or not, actually. It’s a plan for a CMS. There’s apparently been nothing written, but they have a site and a logo and a name.
I’m endeavoring to help jumpstart the development of an open-source CMS application, built using Ruby on Rails, that will will empower writers, editors, publishers, designers, developers, and site owners with the ability to make their websites work for them. Named RailFrog, this application will endeavor to be what Tom Peters calls a WOW! Project and help the Rails framework and community more quickly reach its “tipping point.”
The guy behind this is a designer, apparently, who needs a CMS and is trying to rally developers around a common point. I wish him the best, because I could use a Rails CMS too. Everything else coming out of Rails is so good, I’ll be interested to see what happens in the CMS space.
Radiant CMS: The first true CMS for Ruby, it looks like. We've talked about RailFrog before, but I don't know whether that one ever got past the planning stages. Radiant has a demo, and it seems to be complete. Via CMS Report.
Yeah, he put this up back in June, and NOTHING since then.
Having done a (minimal) CMS in Rails myself, I guess I'm not sure what a "Rails CMS" would be. I used the (in)famous "Salted Passwords Generator" to give my site basic login account functionality, and then like others, had to hack it around until it fit.
It would actually have been faster to roll my own!
I'm starting to agree with David (architect of Rails) who says that reuse is overrated. It truly goes against everything I (would like to) believe about software development, but with Rails-type apps, it's probably faster to start from scratch.
Now a full app? That's different. I've been keeping a text-file with one or two line descriptions of each task I attempt or succeed at at work each day, so when it comes time for the yearly appraisal thing I can do a pretty quick summation of my reasons for existence. I've wanted something web-based (so I can link to Subversion archives of code easily, and search, and present it nicely). So I downloaded InstantRails to my PC at work so I could build something, and lo and behold, it had the Typo blogging package already installed. Tried it out, and it seems good enough for this minimal thing. Might even let my boss subscribe to my RSS feed :-)
with Rails-type apps, it’s probably faster to start from scratch.
This is the exact argument I made here: Rails Blurs the Lines.
When you work with an existing CMS, you have to configure it to work with your content. Rails is so dialed in, the code you write is often less hassle than the configuration you'd have to do with anything else,
About Rails, you can almost say "Rails is already a [insert your app here], it just doesn't know it yet."
The project is live, there is source in the SVN Repository and we are due for working release late March (2006 before anyone cracks a "which year" joke :>). Check out the wiki for more information or come and chat with us on irc.freenode.net in #railfrog.
Tom Gallagher RailFrog Developer
