CMS on Rails

Content management is one of those subjects I often get involved in at work, and something I find pretty interesting as a whole – even if I keep having to reiterate most of the problems with content management are people problems rather than technological ones.

I’ve been using Textpattern for this site and a few others for a couple of years. I’ve spoken before about the recent move to more hand rolled solutions, and the flexibility that gives people to innovate. As well as occasionally threatening to really kick the tyres on Django, Rails or similar (Seaside, Web.py, ...). I’ve been wandering the halls of the web development frameworks all year it seems – playing with Python and Ruby along the way.

To a point however these seemed more developer focused that something I could see being used by a web designer or small company (some intentionally so in fairness) or in education. However I’m back playing with Rails and started looking at existing apps to see how they are put together (I love open source) and a quick recce of Rails based CMS products turned up (amongst others that didn’t interest) Radiant. It appears to have been developed along side the new Ruby site launched in September and boy is it a nice piece of kit.

Assuming you have Rails installed, installation of Radiant is as simple as one command (It’s available as a Gem) and then another to get a site up and running (Ok, plus a couple of other simple commands to configure a database). First impressions it looks well put together, with a strong concept well executed and a lovely Interface. It’s chunky without being cliched and simple without being simplistic. I’m in the process of making plans for next year and this is hopefully going to feature somewhere. I love looking for a problem where I might just already have the solution.

Oh, and a only vaguely related note (well, Wordpress is a content management system of sorts) a couple of friends have started blogging over on breadlinedesign.com and anotherblog.com. Consider this a shameless plug.