A Fresh Cup is Mike Gunderloy's software development weblog, covering Ruby on Rails and whatever else I find interesting in the universe of software. I'm a full-time Rails developer and contributor, available for long- or short-term consulting, with solid experience in working as part of a distributed team. If you'd like to hire me, drop me a line. I'm also the author of Rails Rescue Handbook and Rails Freelancing Handbook.

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Thursday
26Nov2009

Rails CMS Alternatives

I've got a client who wants to integrate a CMS into an existing Rails application. As a result, I've started in on an evaluation of what's out there, to help us make the buy-vs-build decision. Here's the list of potential software that I came up with:

Rails CMS alternatives

Active projects:

adva-cms BrowserCMS Goldberg Kete Radiant Refinery Seed Static Station Typus Zena

Inactive projects:

Ansuz CMS Comatose Geego
  • repo: None - versions available by download
  • site: http://www.geegocms.com/
  • "Manage content with style"
  • Last update: 2007?
  • Dedicated CMS built on top of Rails
Thetis

Dead projects:

Rubricks Widgetfinger
  • site: http://widgetfinger.com
  • Thoughtbot site that allowed generating brochureware right in the browser.
  • Scheduled to go offline 12/21/2009

Related

Blog engines

Static page generators

Wikis

I've also put this list online as a gist. I'll keep that version up to date with corrections and additions.

Reader Comments (6)

Might be nice to include in the list whether each CMS has good test coverage. For instance Refinery although nice, has absolutely no tests and is therefore out of the question for serious projects.

November 26, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterStephen Sykes

Evaluation results? Which one are you going to use (and why)? Which ones to avoid would be nice to know as well (no tests, crappy design, etc.).

November 26, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterAndris

I haven't done the actual evaluation yet. As I get useful info I'll update the list.

November 26, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterMike Gunderloy

This is a really useful post. Thanks Mike! I watched the whole BrowserCMS video. It got me thinking differently about what I'm doing in Rails (always with the custom code) versus what's going on in the Drupal world.

November 27, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterBill

There's also RailFrog which hasn't seen love in a while.

November 30, 2009 | Unregistered CommenterEric

Nice post. There is also a project named Sandstone which intends to be a a drop-in, customizable CMS as a plugin, see this GitHub repository

January 11, 2010 | Unregistered Commenterjofr

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