Rails CMS choices

Fewer CMS choices exist in the Ruby/Rails world compared with PHP. The choices that do exist vary in quality of UI, core code, and gems/plugins selection. This list is a stub for now. It might serve as a starting point for your own research. Our evaluation of Rails CMS choices did not produce a clear winner. We downloaded each from github, installed the app and required gems. We considered code quality, documentation and support, usage of modern gems and plugins, how easy it was to add static and dynamic pages or code to the core, how easy the UI was to understand, and more. My coworker and myself have experience with Radiant, so we were primarily comparing the others against it. Maintainers of the CMS will be 2 Rails developers. We have 1 designer, and several non-technical content authors. Content entry needs to be easy for our team. A workflow system would not be utilized.

Evaluated these

Radiant CMS

  • Clean administrative UI
  • Active development (September 2009)
  • A volunteer group I was part of built americas.org with Radiant. Building HTML/CSS templates outside of Radiant first is highly recommended. We noticed varying levels of Radiant plugin quality/maintenance. Radiant seems to be flexible enough and has a usable UI, though it could be fairly heavyweight for a small project or team. It is under active development.

Adva CMS

  • Seems promising, documentation lacking (August 2009)
  • The Rails engines approach is interesting. UI is nice.

Browser CMS

  • Workflow features, would be overly complicated for our team.
  • Has the most impressive way of editing content visually.

Refinery Content Manager

  • Simple UI
  • Refinery code is within a Rails app as a plugin

RubyFlow

  • The source code behind RubyFlow and other sites by Peter Cooper, could be useful for a news site but probably not a CMS contender.

Interesting, but unevaluated apps

Zena

  • Multilingual may be useful for you. Originally developed in Rails 1.2 timeframe.

Seed CMS

  • Good out of the box styling

Other possible solutions

These choices are perhaps older or less supported, but may be worth considering.

If very minimal editing is necessary, Static may work. Made for easy deployment on Heroku, which does not offer local file storage (outside of /tmp), so configuration of an Amazon S3 account is necessary to store uploads. Simple code, zero UI, a starter app.

If editing on the web is not necessary at all, Marley may be an option for your team or company.

Nesta is built on the Sinatra Ruby framework.

Finally, if your website isn't going to change frequently, and technical people can change it (check it out, make code/copy changes, deploy it), you might consider a static site generator. Staticmatic lets you build a site with Rails view concepts using Haml and Sass.

Update: 4/10/2010 Rojo CMS

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