Is the Rails ecosystem a suitable replacement for drupal

Question

I want to create a community-based site, which is the power of Drupal. However, I also want to try other frameworks, especially Rails.

One of the best things about drupal is its huge library of modules. If I switched to Rails, could I find similar functionality freely available as plugins, or would I have to rebuild?

Does Rails have an equivalent (like plugins or gems):

CCK/Fields? Node Reference? Views / Views Relationships? PathAuto? Threaded Commenting? Multisite Functionality? Apache Solr (or equivalent) Integration? 

Thanks.

Answer 1

I am afraid that you are likely to hear this answer, but this is not a suitable comparison.

Drupal is ultimately a CMS, Rails is a framework. Apples with oranges or even apple juice with oranges. You start Drupal out of the box, and these are “things”: it has a database structure, the concept of nodes, the interfaces blah, blah. If you are running Rails, you have an empty project.

As far as I know, there is no Drupal-on-Rails project that would be a suitable equivalent. However, I can confirm that there are so many Ruby / Rails and O / S communities, and you can find something suitable. I would also say that the level of modularity in Ruby and Rails tends to mean that the range of plugins / modules / gems that can be used is much larger.

My personal $ 0.02. If Drupal does what you need, just use Drupal: it's mature and has a great community. It is never recommended that you try to port Project X to a new language as a training exercise, because you will inevitably fall into "Well, how is it done in X!" trap and frustration in the new system.

If you want to learn Rails (what you need is awesome), I would advise you to work best on a small project and see what the ecosystem has to offer before deciding if it suits your larger project needs.

Answer 2

I have to repeat what Govan said, but add to it.

With Drupal, if you really do not want to create your own modules and extensions, you really interact with the application. Even when you start using CCK, all you really do is switch radio buttons, fill out forms, and define new content options on the site.

Ruby on Rails are two things, and none of them have much in common with Drupal. You asked, “How hard is that?” To answer, you need to understand what Ruby and Rails are. Ruby is a programming language designed to make the life of a purist programmer easier and more enjoyable. So, the first part of how difficult it is to simply answer: "How long do you think you will need to learn a completely new programming language, such as PHP, but different."

Rails is a stubborn structure. He doubted that he describes how the Ruby web project should be structured, as well as providing several APIs for everything from database access to web presentation. To answer the question “how difficult is it” for Rails, then (assuming you know Ruby at this point), you should answer how much you need to know about caching, database design, page design, RESTful programming, etc.

This is not a short trip. you asked if there is a CCK equivalent for Ruby and Rails, which implies that at the moment your programming knowledge is somewhat limited. Ruby and Rails interact with the database. CCK allows you to define things in the database. Thus, with Ruby and Rails, you effectively bypass the wonderful dialogs and forms that CCK provides to you and does the bit of data definition yourself, in code.

From experience, when I hired experts in a different programming language and framework in my Rails teams, he took them from 1 to 3 months to get productivity, and from 3 to 6 months so that their performance started to increase and go to Rails experts in to my team.

Thus, in your particular case, I would not recommend switching from Drupal to Ruby on Rails.

Answer 3

• Drupal (core) on ohloh (130k lines of code) is estimated at 34 years of work.
• Drupal (contributions) on ohloh (modules for Drupal 4-6 (7M lines of code)) is estimated at 2113 years of work.

This is the power of the community, and this is something you can never reproduce. I remember that there was a guy who tried porting Drupal to python, calling it drupy , but this project died before something useful ever came out of it. Even if you copy the code, you can never copy the community.

What you need to understand is that each community is different. Therefore, even if you find a project that can solve your needs for code in RoR or another language / structure, it will never look like Drupal and vice versa.

So do not try to find a replacement for Drupal, but explore and try new things. You can end up learning new things that you can use for your Drupal projects.

Answer 4

I read these times and times, when people said that the drupal a ror comparison compares an apple with an orange, which is wrong.

I think BS itself is. Yes, we want to compare an apple with an orange and find out which is better. We even want to compare an apple with a steak. Said they are different. Yes, we all know. I also have limited experience. At first I thought that Drupal was great and could help me create a website that I wanted in one night (or in a week or a month), then this did not happen (without blaming Drupal).

I got the impression that Drupal might still be great, but it has a learning curve and needs a lot of other knowledge or talents to use it well and set it up. RoR, on the other hand, is a more general structure and requires programming (Drupal also needs this).

If you're more like a web designer with a little PHP, then Drupal might be a better fit.

If you are more like a type of web developer, don’t want to spend time searching for modules and making them work, but do them yourself (not from scratch), then RoR is probably for you (with the same amount of training). So yes, they are both good for different purposes, background, etc.

Now I will move on to RoR (or dJango and other ORANGE). My 2 cents.

Answer 5

Starting with version 3.0, Rails has officially adopted the once controversial way to enable third-party applications. it's roughly the equivalent of Drupal modules / plugins in terms of 10,000 feet. To create a community-based website, you can use an engine called the "Community Engine". http://communityengine.org/features.html "

The Rails ecosystem is nowhere near the same number of modules that Drupalists are available, but there are enough quality to cover the basic basics.

Answer 6

Drupal has so many powerful areas, it is difficult for only one or two people to recreate it in a decent amount of time in any language. PHP, Ruby, Python, etc.

You have the main node system, taxonomy, aliases, menus, users, permissions and modules, api database and api form, among others.

You will need to know how to assemble all of these parts yourself and create the structure necessary for this to work together.

It takes more than a few hours. I would say, even if you are a ROR master, you look at a year to two years of solid consistent work to get the best Drupal parts for the new system.