[OT] Rails CMS (was Re: [Rails] Introduce yourself and your project)

[Jarkko Laine]

Hallo Sascha,

Read your post and just couldn't help replying. For others, sorry for 
the off-topic post, but I feel this might be interesting to you as 
well.

Here's an article by Jeff Veen that every CMS vendor should take into 
their heart: http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000622.html

I'm in a process of selecting an open source CMS for a site at the 
moment, and here's a few things that have struck me *a lot*:
- pretty url's: many cms vendors announce them but they're mostly 
lying. In most php systems they are either artificial structures built 
on top of the actual content, or quasi-pretty, like 
"site.com/node/23453" instead of 
"site.com/products/razors/philishave-8080". The pretty-url phenomenon 
has been motivated mostly via search engine friendliness but I think 
it's mostly a human factor. People remember, link to and generally like 
better pages that have an understandable url. For your system this 
should be a piece of cake, given the amazing flexibility of rails url 
handling.
- Hierarchical organization of things. Thank god, you mention this in 
your post :) For a site of decent size, it just doesn't cut it that you 
have a "flat nodespace" even if you can then write aliases to those 
nodes or even if you can build an external "category topology" for the 
content (pointing at you, Drupal, here). After a short look at 
ezpublish, I find it does a pretty decent job at this (like it does at 
i18n).
- Which brings us to the multi-lingual content. Please take this into 
account already in the planning phase as it can be a royal PITA to be 
added later.
- Make sure it's easy to install even on a shared service like 
TextDrive. So that it doesn't require a major amount of root-only 
configuration like Midgard. This might be in a controversy with 
"multiple different websites under one adminstration" — I'd prefer the 
easy installation over the latter any day. Heck, make it easy to 
install in general and you'd be good.

Overall, your proposal looks very promising and interesting. Please 
keep us informed, I'm at least very eager to help with your project.

Cheers,
Jarkko

On 14.12.2004, at 18:25, Sascha Ebach wrote:

> - Sascha Ebach
> - Entrepeneur
> - Living in Troisdorf Germany, which is right in between of Cologne 
> and Bonn.
> - MCMS which stands for Magical Content Management Solution
> MCMS will a try to make a cms that ppl want to actually use, but 
> nevertheless will have a lot of functionality. It will be magical and 
> it will be open source.
>
> ROADMAP
> =======
> * Unique concentration on usability, web standards and accessibility
> * Contentrepository as a tree, so you will be able easily extend the 
> functionality of a corporate website to a blog with comments, a forum, 
> a shop, a whatever. Something along the lines of ezpublish and drupal.
> * Versioning
> * WYSIWYG editing (with FCKEditor, which I find amazing)
> * different views and the administration, so new users and powerusers 
> can feel at home
> * Maybe even edit-in-place, like you can see in Bitflux CMS, or LIMB. 
> But I am uncertain about that as I think edit in place is not always 
> the most generally applicable solution, esp. if you wanna have a cms 
> which handles
> * multiple diffrent websites under one adminstration
> * media repository
> * make it possible to turn it in a hostable solution (this one will 
> probably by closed source)
> * lots of other things
>
> Current progress is 10%. As I am working on this alone, have a 
> business to run (where I can not always program in ruby) and my family 
> to care about, progress is not going to be very fast. Hopefully it 
> will be something usable within the next 6-12 months. If luck strikes 
> me and if what they say about rails is true, than it might be earlier 
> ;)
>
> As soon as I have something usable I will create an enironment where 
> collaboration is possible. If you wanna help, please wait a little 
> while until I get my act together. Which (I feel sometimes) could 
> never happen ;) I will announce it on this list.
>
> -- 
> Sascha Ebach
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails at lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>
--
Jarkko Laine
http://jlaine.net
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