Ruby on Rails Content Management Systems?

Question

Is there a viable open source Ruby on Rails content management system out there?

I need a CMS with the ability to manage structured content, content relationships, classification (structured taxonomy and free tagging) and simple publishing workflow. I'd prefer the content ultimately be persisted as XML. Also content needs to be abstracted away from the page(s) it's published.

Thanks, Mike

Answer 1

You could try RadiantCMS.

Answer 2

Other choices are Mephisto and others listed at InfoQ. I've done fine by building on top of the Goldberg plugin, but that's because I anticipated writing a custom code with respect to classification of content.

As you know, any CMS will have competing and variable requirements. That usually explains why everyone and their uncle has their own CMS.

Answer 3

I've heard good things about Comatose. If I recall correctly, you're not given a complete app in which you are given a few hooks where you add your customizations. Rather, you specify a few spots in your Rails app where you need CMS functionality, and everywhere else you keep complete control over your app.

If you want a turnkey solution, I'll have to concur with others. Either RadiantCMS, Mephisto or Typo may be good choices.

If worse comes to worse, check out the comparison on Wikipedia. It probably has much more CMSes than you ever wanted to hear about, as it's not Ruby specific :-)

Answer 4

I have to disagree with the suggestion of RadiantCMS. While it's a good CMS for some applications (and we use it at work), I don't think it meets the requirements specified (based on my experience using it, which admittedly is not all that extensive):

• there's no classification system;
• the publishing workflow is too simplistic -- i.e. a page is draft or published, and there's no approval workflow;
• the content is plain HTML or one of a few markup languages, not XML;
• you can abstract content away from published pages with snippets, but that quickly becomes unmanageable.

There may be a suitable Ruby on Rails CMS for your requirements, but I don't think that RadiantCMS is it.

Answer 5

I have to agree with TimB. I implemented RadiantCMS when my company was first getting started and it worked great. However, it is focused on being simple to setup and use and is not a full featured CMS with workflow and such.

We actually moved away from Radiant several months ago and are now very happy using SilverStripe. SS would do most if not all of what you requested, unfortunately it is based on PHP and not Ruby so I'm not sure how much help that is.

Later...
Richard

Answer 6

I have tried RadiantCMS and having worked with Drupal, I think RadiantCMS is nowhere near being a complete Content Management System. I have also been looking for a CMS like Drupal in RoR. Take a look at this: http://joshhuckabee.com/drupal-and-ruby-rails

Answer 7

There is also a plugin called Station. I have not used it yet, but it was featured on RubyInside.

Answer 8

Comatose is pretty good, and it integrates pretty unobtrusively into existing sites. The best thing about Comatose is that you can define your own text filters. For example, to use HAML in your pages, just drop this into an initializer:

# HAML Text Filter
TextFilters.define :haml, "HAML" do
  require 'haml'
  def render_text(text)
    engine = Haml::Engine.new(text)
    engine.render 
  end
end

Answer 9

We develop an Open Source Item & Content Management system that has pretty good taxonomy(unlimited category descendants/depth). It's designed to list different items(these items can be pages, blog posts, vendors, etc.). Not sure if this will suit your needs, but you can try out a demo at:

http://hulihanapplications.com/projects/opal

Hope this helps.