Rails 3 The CMS + blog wanted to fit on an existing site. Unobtrusive and easy

Question

I would like to add a CMS and a blog to a web application. One that will not interfere. There is not a lot of content there, but enough that we want non-developers to be able to revise the pages and probably add and remove them too.

We have a significant application that cannot be touched by CMS, and not the site that we transfer.

How did you deal with this situation?

Would you advise:

• Launch of two applications (content application and application application)
• Connect lightweight CMS
• Roll our own stones / plugins for WYSIWYG

More details

We will also add a picketing and support system. Perhaps embedded in the application.

We would like users of the application to be able to comment on pages and blog posts, store files, etc. from your main account, so it makes sense to create it in our application, and not as an additional application. Love listening to war stories about this.

Must be:

• Unobtrusive (should not interfere with an existing application)
• Not to be confused with Devise, DeclarativeAuthorization, or Omniauth. We have extensive user accounts, permissions, authentication mechanisms, and group settings. They must stay.
• Lightweight (prefer something friendly than a function loaded)

Required Features:

• Basic WYSIWYG for content editors
• Allows us to process accounts (using Devise)
• and possibly even permissions (with DeclarativeAuthorization)

I read this similar question, but the author seems to want to have something more intrusive. Simple Rails 3 CMS Gem / Plugin?

Parameters found

Refinery seems to have many features, but with a quick glance it needs a lot of control over what happens: http://refinerycms.com/guides/attaching-refinery-cms-to-an-existing-rails-application He says that he modular, but it seems that there is a large piece of inactive things.

Radiant seems a little monolithic http://groups.google.com/group/radiantcms/browse_thread/thread/b691cf9ab644a8b2

ComfortableMexicanSofa seems a little closer to what I want: https://github.com/twg/comfortable-mexican-sofa

Adva-Cms has the right philosophy, but seems to be dead. Adva-Cms2 is not ready http://adva-cms.org/

The governor seems good, but maybe too young and thin https://github.com/carpeliam/governor

Conclusion

Until now, our own version, or using ComfortableMexicanSofa, seems like a bet, but I would like you to think before I spend a few days with it.

Answer 1

Now I’m launching my own blog application, and I’m kind of new to Rails 3. Even so, after 1 week I have a blog with tags, comments, authentication with omniauth, etc., my advice: minimize your own. I had the same doubts and the search for ready-made solutions, and I decided to start from scratch and just look for plugins for everything I need.

This is pretty fast if you already know that some rails are programming and you are using the right plugins. This is what I used:

• Omniauth so that users can settle using facebook, twitter, etc. and leave comments.

• rails_admin: it allows you to manage your blog by going to yourapp.com/admin It uses the application to create the Admin user (you can specify a different model name than the user, so as not to mix it with users from omniauth or from your other application), and if you have the correct models and associations between them, you can create your messages, assign tags or categories to them, as well as delete comments, etc., all this is done easily. For the text area that you use to represent the contents of your posts, you can associate it with ckeditor by simply adding something like the rails_admin initializer:

  config.model Post do edit do field :body, :text do ckeditor true end end end 

  And with ckeditor you can create pictures, attach videos, format text, etc.

• Use kaminari to paginate, or you can use will_paginate if you're more used to it.

• Using a drawing frame for styling with css you will save time and get a more standard style.

• Use multiple jquery lines to insert / remove comments.

And that’s all I can remember now. And if this should not interfere with the main application, I would just assign a subdomain for it. Therefore, if you go to blog.myapp.com, you get access to the blog, and if you go to myapp.com, you will get access to the application. And you want users from the application to interact with the blog, so you should use only one application and have these 2 subdomains pointing to different parts of the same application. Take a look at: rails 3 - one application, several domains, how to implement another "root" route for one of the domains?

That’s all I can think of right now! let me know if I can help you with anything else.

Answer 2

rails_admin: it allows you to manage your blog by going to yourapp.com/admin It uses the application to create the Admin user (you can specify a different model name than the user, so as not to mix it with users from omniauth or from your other application), and if you have the correct models and associations between them, you can create your messages, assign tags or categories to them, as well as delete comments, etc., all this is done easily. For the text area that you use to represent the contents of your posts, you can associate it with ckeditor by simply adding something like the rails_admin initializer:

 config.model Post do edit do field :body, :text do ckeditor true end end end