best ruby on rails cms [closed]

Question

i need to choose a cms for my next project, i have searched and come up with these 2 : radiant and refinery, which one is better for building middle size websites ? are there any other options out there for rails cms ? one important factor is that client can easily update their website without much knowledge thnx for helping

Pond

Answer 1

I'm one of the developers of Refinery CMS and I would recommend it for the use you've described.

Refinery has been built over a period of 4 years where we have shown it to regular people and let them update their site without our help. We purposely leave out technical details from the UI so it is extremely straight forward for a non-technical client to use.

Which is who a CMS is supposed to be for, right?!

If you have a smaller site you need to build in the future, there is also a hosted version of Refinery called Refinery HQ which allows you to quickly and cheaply give your client an editable site using all the same tools the open source project offers.

Vining

Because you're a developer/contributor to an Open Source project. I give you cred. Way to go! – Agronomy

We've just chosen Refinery as our CMS of choice at my workplace (a mid-sized ad agency in Chicago). We like the portability of code, and the themes support. I highly recommend it as well. – Galbraith

Refinery would be great but given the current instructions on the site I have yet to get it to work on Fedora 17 – Perihelion

Answer 2

I find that the field is still very fragmented. I've looked at Radiant, adva-cms, BrowserCMS, and Refinery over the last year. My simple take is this:

• Radiant is the most mature, but takes over the whole application stack with its proprietary flavor. Adding your own application to it is not just like writing a Rails app, but you have to learn the Radiant extension way to do it. Rake tasks, test suites, migrations are all non-standard. This limits flexibility, and comes with much higher staff training requirements.
• adva-cms is built as a Rails engine (ships as gem), and doesn't take over the application stack, so you can develop Rails applications as before and adva-cms coexists peacefully. It has nice support for interationalization and multi-site support. It's promising, and they just released adva-cms2, a complete rewrite targeting Rails 3. It's promising and yet very young.
• BrowserCMS, like adva-cms, is a Rails engine and struck me as a tad more mature, when I first looked at it 9 months ago, but development appears to have slowed down. I chose it for a project earlier this year, but we're wondering what on-going developer activity will be like. As of this writing there is no Rails 3-compatible release yet.
• RefineryCMS seems to have a lot of activity and commercial backing, but unlike the other 3 still has no test suite. A 4-year old project in Rails without test suite is too great of a risk. When it'll hit that exponential curve of increasing cost of change due to lacking regression is debatable, but whether it'll come is not. I'm also weary of developers in this day and age working in Rails who still don't understand TDD. Your mileage may vary.

All told, there is no one brain-dead simple option yet that fills most needs. Choose based on your needs.

Update 9/2011: We've recently been using the rails_admin gem which works wonderfully well, isn't very intrusive and allows for lots of customization. It's probably the new Rails 3 and after standard. There's also active_admin that follows a similar concept we've used on another project.

Farleigh

Answer 3

I really like RefineryCMS as it is flexible to use, does not deviate from Rails way of things, and is very extensible. Converting an existing Rails app to a Refinery app is a breeze. They do have a cucumber test suite with 46 odd scenarios, and you will have to decide its effectiveness.

On the other hand, Radiant is also very good, but it has a bigger learning curve as it is very extensive and proprietary in nature. Although the extension base for Radiant is huge, for adding new functionality, one has to rely on an existing extension or build one. It is hard to take an existing Rails app and convert it to a Radiant app.

Unkennel

Answer 4

Having contributed patches to Radiant in the past, and having used Refinery (though only briefly), I would lean towards Radiant. The plethora of extensions make it very easy to extend, and one of the planned features for 2.0 (as discussed on #RadiantCMS on Freenode) is to make the extensions a bit more Rails-friendly (Think Rails 3 Engines), so the problem of porting existing apps to extensions easily should be resolved after Rails 3 support is finalized. The current plan is to begin hacking on Rails 3 support in earnest after the 1.0 release.

Radiant 1.0.0.RC4 is currently very easy to install and use. There are great instructions for getting it setup and deployed on the GitHub Wiki, and the first full release of Radiant 1.0 should be any day now, so this is the perfect time to start using it or get involved with its development.

In my opinion, there is no finer CMS for small-medium sized teams (even with large teams, it can be made to scale fairly well, though I find this requires a tiny bit more work than the average user will be willing to put in).

EDIT: Also, Radiant 1.0 RC4 will run fine on Ruby versions 1.8.7 - 1.9.3. Just so you can make sure it fits in with your existing Ruby setup.

Para