

Ask HN: Best Rails CMS? - instakill

Which is recommended and why? For instance, what does Refinery have over Rubricks or Locomotive?
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patio11
Apologies for answering in this fashion:

After looking into this earlier, I came to the conclusion that the best for my
purposes was Wordpress. Clever use of Nginx configs let's it pretend that it
is really on the Rails site, and you can use XMLRPC to transfer data if you
need it.

Why? Well, basically, the WP ecosystem is ridiculously superior to that of
Rails CMSes, and as much as I love writing Rails I would prefer to just drop
in a prebuilt plugin rather than writing code that people don't pay money for.

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dennyabraham
For a client, I recently had to evaluate a number of Rails content management
systems. For their specific needs, they chose Radiant because of its large
plugin ecosystem and its relative maturity.

I soon discovered that despite being the rails solution that best fit the
project, it still lagged far behind wordpress and other similarly battle-
hardened software. Most of the other options didn't fare better.

Unless you need interoperability with Ruby libraries, need direct access to
ActiveRe* datasources, or you have a well-defined, tightly-limited use case,
I'd recommend going with wordpress or something equally mature.

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gexla
If I may, I would like to ask another question. Why a Rails CMS? Shouldn't the
question be; whats the best CMS? If I needed a CMS, I wouldn't limit myself to
something built on Rails. Sure, you may need to extend that CMS and you want
not want to do anything in PHP, but you should be able to do small
modifications easy enough. If you need anything big modifications, then
perhaps you would be better off building something from scratch.

Also consider the goals of a CMS vs your own goals as a developer. A CMS needs
to be flexible for non developers to handle a wide range of tasks. Your own
system only needs to handle the basics but be easily extendable (something
which Rails should largely bring by itself.) In other words, Rails is already
a very basic CMS.

Otherwise, I can't answer the question of "what's the best CMS" in general
because different systems are better for different needs. I imagine the Ruby /
Rails options are the same. You would likely be better off trying each of
those that catch your eye and making a decision from there.

