Are you using any CMS or simply building from scratch?

[Linus Pettersson]

Hi!

When I'm creating an application for a project of my own I usually use Active Admin or something for my admin area and code everything else myself. The backend interface is not always perfect but it's OK because only I will use it. The few quirks and weird stuff is OK because I know how everything works. The non-intuitive gets intuitive to me because I'm the developer :)

When creating something for a client it may be more important with a good and intuitive interface, easy content management etc. In the PHP world i guess most people use something like Joomla!, Drupal or Wordpress for these kind of projects. They are easy to use, have the WYSIWYG editors etc. that the client can use to create and manage the content.

- What do you use when developing in RoR for a client? Is it only 100% custom applications (with the use of some gems of course, like maybe devise etc.)?

Is anyone using any CMS in the RoR world? I have seen a few, like LocomotiveCMS, RadiantCMS etc, but I have never used one in a project.

What are your experiences here?

Cheers!

[sameera]

Hi Linus,

Yes , In ruby world also we use CMSs  a lot (Like you said, LocomotiveCMS, RadiantCMS, Refinary etc...), But having said that sometimes its good to create a project from scratch as you have the full control.

I have good and bad experience in having CMSs as the base project, I had one project (which I inherited from another party to finish) which was developed for a specific client need, but unfortunately the initial team has used a CMS and it was very had to implement some of the very straight forward feature (in pure rails)  as I had to compliment to CMS workflow.

But on the other hand, I had some good experience with CMS as sometimes the client want a basic website with editing pages etc.. so CMS would be your ideal friend (I personally prefer Refinary (http://refinerycms.com/) due to simplicity and rails3 support)

And I'm not a big fan of ActiveAdmin, but I do use twitterbootstrap (http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/) and its rails gem (https://github.com/seyhunak/twitter-bootstrap-rails/) to make my pages pretty, I guess its worth to have a look.

and for simple CMS kind of features you may use the 'liquid' gem (http://liquidmarkup.org/) as well

So all in all, using a CMS or not is depending on your client requirment

hope this helps

cheers

sameera

[Ace Suares]

I am working on an admin interface, that could be easily transformed in a custom-made CMS, https://github.com/acesuares/inline_forms, it's heavily in development. One problem at the moment you need to install rvm (https://rvm.io) but I hope to lift that restraint soon.

Cheers
ace