Re: [rails-oceania] Re: Looking for generic CMS recommendations to use in a commerce shop

[Tim Uckun]

The problem with refinery (and most other rails CMS projects) is that
you need to be a developer, have write access to the repo and deploy
permissions if you want to create content types. Pria was asking for a
system which would let certain users create content types through the
GUI.

It seems like it would be a nice feature to have especially if you are
able to specify validations, workflows etc. Plone let's you do all
that but it's kind of a behemoth.



On Sun, Jun 24, 2012 at 2:10 AM, Rich@thelogicbox
<richla...@gmail.com> wrote:
> RefineryCMS is widely used and much loved.
> https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=cms
>
>
> On Saturday, 23 June 2012 11:54:21 UTC+10, Pria wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I am looking for a Rails 3.x based CMS gem/engine that can support custom
>> data set for use within a website. Couple of solutions I considered are
>> locomotive and comfortable mexican sofa. Both of them seem more suited for
>> blog style websites. The closest I found to support some form of dynamic
>> content creation was Google Forms (though not a CMS).
>>
>> Ideally the CMS will be a reusable admin portal that allows an
>> authenticated user to define a "Content Type" and associated attributes with
>> data type. A Content Manager adds actual data to these predefined content
>> types, which will be visible in the public facing website. I have also
>> explored Spree Commerce, but feel it is an overkill for my use.
>>
>> Please let me know if there is an alternative I can consider. If anyone is
>> interested, I am also open to funding a project to build a solution.
>>
>> Thanks for your help.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Pria
>>
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[Mark Ratjens]

We'd have something, but we're a little ways off ... good to know of the need.

--

Mark Ratjens

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Sydney, Australia

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@MarkRatjens

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[Mark Ratjens]

Pria, 

We have no hard launch date at present. If I could understand your specific requirements (for example, what kinds of content, what workflow process you want_, I could be clearer. Can we take this off group?

To give you an idea where we are going, this article provides some motivation: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/content-management-systems-just-dont-work/ Essentially, the architecture of our product aims at allowing users to do more than a typical CMS while providing clear ways for Rails developers to extend, or even replace, what's there.  

cheers

Mark

On 27 June 2012 02:59, Pria <ng....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the recommendations. My users are predominantly non technical folks who want to develop content on different topics. This is what got me started for a solution that can be simple enough without needing too much hand holding. I will investigate more on the suggestions.

@mark, your solution sounds interesting. Do you have an estimate about your service launch?

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[Daniel Draper]

Its not free but its very capable and easy-to-use: https://www.wheelhousecms.com/

Dan

On 23 June 2012 11:24, Pria <ng....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I am looking for a Rails 3.x based CMS gem/engine that can support custom data set for use within a website. Couple of solutions I considered are locomotive and comfortable mexican sofa. Both of them seem more suited for blog style websites. The closest I found to support some form of dynamic content creation was Google Forms (though not a CMS).

Ideally the CMS will be a reusable admin portal that allows an authenticated user to define a "Content Type" and associated attributes with data type. A Content Manager adds actual data to these predefined content types, which will be visible in the public facing website. I have also explored Spree Commerce, but feel it is an overkill for my use.

Please let me know if there is an alternative I can consider. If anyone is interested, I am also open to funding a project to build a solution.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Pria

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AppLaunch | Rescue Ops | Integrate

[Nicholas Faiz]

Hi Mark,

I was working on something similar two years ago (see https://github.com/nicholasf/inkling). 

I'm kind of out of this development space now and can't really type now, but if we both end up at the RORO on Thursday evening I'd be happy to discuss my thinking with you. Otherwise we could swap a few emails.

Cheers,

Nicholas

On Wednesday, June 27, 2012 9:39:59 AM UTC+10, Mark Ratjens wrote:

Pria, 

We have no hard launch date at present. If I could understand your specific requirements (for example, what kinds of content, what workflow process you want_, I could be clearer. Can we take this off group?

To give you an idea where we are going, this article provides some motivation: http://sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/content-management-systems-just-dont-work/ Essentially, the architecture of our product aims at allowing users to do more than a typical CMS while providing clear ways for Rails developers to extend, or even replace, what's there.  

cheers

Mark

On 27 June 2012 02:59, Pria <ng....@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the recommendations. My users are predominantly non technical folks who want to develop content on different topics. This is what got me started for a solution that can be simple enough without needing too much hand holding. I will investigate more on the suggestions.

@mark, your solution sounds interesting. Do you have an estimate about your service launch?

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[Tim Uckun]

Hey guys I would like to be included in any discussions on this topic. We are also in need of a good CMS and are not averse to joining an effort to create one or take an existing one and make it work like we want.
So far we are looking at comfortable mexican sofa and railsyard as good candidates but I would love to hear of your experiences with others.

Cheers.

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[Daryl Manning]

I have to admit I'd love to be kept in the loop on this. I often find it strange rails doesn't have a wp/drupal pice of software for CMS at this point (though a few contenders I guess).

And thanks to whoever mentioned comfortable mexican sofa. I'd never even heard of that one before... 

D

[Mark Ratjens]

It's part of Habanero's mission to fill this gap with the product we are developing, called Green. For those interested, I'd be happy to take are more detailed discussion offline. I'm in Sydney and will start coming to RORO meetings there. A trip to Melbourne would not be out of the question either. Nicholas, I had a quick look at your repo. While our architecture is different to yours (we're primarily using a user-populated metadata model rather than a DSL, I believe there is room in architectures for your approach and ideas. It's still early days for us yet, which means it's also a good time to listen to other passionate folks and see that we all benefit. 

[Nicholas Faiz]

Hi Mark,

Basically my thinking was that there are two types of CMS' - brochure sites and ones with higher complexity. The first sort can easily use most of the CMS' available. I was trying to create a set of tools to make it easier to build bespoke CMS systems for the second sort of problem. Those systems have enough uniqueness in their requirements to deserve a bespoke approach, but it's much better if you can leverage a DSL to quickly get things done.

Then there are just general things when building a CMS - like good manners when being an engine (not assuming that you can blithely generate a migration for a Users table in the host app.), or having configurable content-types (plugins). 

I think the way to solve the content-type problem, mentioned above, would be to use Engines, and make them hot deployable (so you'd actually tell a running Rails instance to load some code). I haven't explored this option - I imagine it would be possible somehow (Mephisto was able to dynamically load its plugins years ago).

Cheers,

Nicholas

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[Mark Ratjens]

Hi Nicholas,

In my experience, it doesn't take my for forces to build against a brochure site to morph it into you second kind, which is why we're looking at solving the second problem while allowing users to build brochures sites without being exposed to the deeper functionality of the product.

Content types, or 'varieties' as we call them in Green, are really the foundation for us. Green architecture is agnostic about what varieties a site needs, although we've defined metadata for some obvious ones. We don't see engines existing for different collections of varieties, just archives of metadata for those varieties. Functionality is gained by loading metadata archives (we call the pantries). The reason we've gone down the metadata track is we want users to be able to build as much of it as possible, rather than relying on developers writing DSL. We're pragmatic though, and recognise some things are just worth 'hardening' a bit more: a developer would prefer to work closer to the code. So I see out two approaches as being applicable, depending on the context and complexity of the varieties required.

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[Mark Ratjens]

Fair enough, John, but I'm here to solve problems, not create them. Let's hope my experience doesn't lead me down the same road as yours.

On 27 June 2012 15:09, John Carney <johnca...@gmail.com> wrote:

In my experience, any CMS that allows users to create content types through a GUI is a behemoth almost by definition.

John

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[Rob Howard]

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Mark Ratjens <ma...@ratjens.com> wrote:

The reason we've gone down the metadata track is we want users to be able to build as much of it as possible, rather than relying on developers writing DSL. We're pragmatic though, and recognise some things are just worth 'hardening' a bit more: a developer would prefer to work closer to the code. So I see out two approaches as being applicable, depending on the context and complexity of the varieties required.

That sounds cool. But how do you deal with the problems that come with having lots of configuration in the database, a la Drupal (or Wordpress with ACF, or MODx, or RadiantCMS, or even Spree sometimes)?

Previous experience with this sort of setup has lead to:

• A lot of pain moving "configuration" data between development, staging, live (and the other way, or between two development systems). Wordpress has an XML dump, Drupal has things like Aegis (?) or Export module, and MODx and RadiantCMS just have pain and horror.
  
  
• Losing the benefit of tooling that code versioning brings. Even if you have something like Mongo or CouchDB that versions documents, how do you do things like branching when you're working on features? (Seed files and export dumps everywhere?)

I'm not trying to be difficult, sorry, but I haven't yet seen this done in a way that isn't really painful. I'm happy to learn about any alternate approaches you or the list might suggest.

- Rob H

[parndt]

Which is why Refinery doesn't have that 'feature' :-)

In version 2.0 we moved further away from storing things in the database because it's unreliable, messy and hard to migrate between environments. I'd far prefer to give the developer greater control whilst giving the user the ability to edit the things the developer *wants* them to edit.

What I want to add in future is a git backend for storing things like pages (or anything really) .. but that's a pipe dream currently.

[Mark Ratjens]

Rob, 

There is no doubt the deployment, version control and migration of metadata is a pain. We've been working on a side plugin, called Pantry, that unloads select data and is smart enough to know how to 'stitch' the data back in during a reload or even a migration to another environment. It does the by defining what the "value identifiers" are for any object thats being 'stacked' in a pantry. On reload, Pantry compares value ids and you can define what you want when there is a value clash with data already present in the environment.

In practice, it works, but only just. Debugging is hard and some of the edge cases are diabolical. But there is enough of it working for us to persist with it at this time. At some point, I will look more closely at Clifford Heath's Constellation stuff ... what he has done there is profound. I think there is a future in which we drop Pantry and use constellations.

I am aware, that many developers would not want to follow us into this. There be beasties in meta-stuff. I respect anyone's views that say it's not worth trying. I welcome scepticism and constructive criticism.

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[Tim Uckun]

I noticed today that copycopter was open sourced.

Something to add to the mix.

[Tim Uckun]

>
> A lot of pain moving "configuration" data between development, staging, live
> (and the other way, or between two development systems). Wordpress has an
> XML dump, Drupal has things like Aegis (?) or Export module, and MODx and
> RadiantCMS just have pain and horror.
>

I think you have to be able to tag the documents themselves as
staging, production, etc and have them all be in the database all the
time. Serve the documents according to the domain (staging.blah.com
gets staging content for example). Treat it like a versioning problem
or a document state.