Blog backend for non developers Rails - ruby-on-rails

I need a very simple, backend visual representation of creating a blog post. Since the blog writers are not developers, I need something that can make blog posting easy. I know RedCloth is available but I'm looking for something more simple, but not a CMS since it infects my app and mutates it like no other.

I would recommend the ActiveAdmin gem.
Here is a free (very helpful) RailsCast that goes through the configuration and features of the gem.
ActiveAdmin should have no problem suiting your needs.

Check out the Comfy Blog project.
https://github.com/comfy/comfy-blog
ComfyBlog is an simple blog management engine for Rails 3.1 apps. It also integrates with ComfortableMexicanSofa CMS Engine. The nice thing about this project is that it doesn't interfere with your existing controllers, and "it's just Rails".

Related

Rails ecommerce site with Spree what should be ideal blog solution

I have e-commerce site using spree. What should be ideal blog solution please suggest. Since the blog has to be updated almost daily it should be like CMS with end customer able to do the same. Should I use spree-blogging-spree gem or maybe blog hosted separately on wordpress ? What would be little scalable and convenient for a zero tech customer?
By your own definition ("zero tech customer") I would avoid any solution involving coding or custom code. Blog is an area where dozens of very good solution exists "of the shelf", so I would go for a WordPress or equivalent. You could even get the hosting done for you.
Integration can be as simple as putting the blog on a subdomain, for example if your ecommerce is hosted at pikachu-go.com, you could have blog.pikachu-go.com to point to the WordPress instance.
This means that the blog & ecommerce are totally independant, which should be for the best. You'll have a bit of work to ensure visual consistency between both, but a good palette and a logo may be enough to start.
If for any reason you really need the blog to be part of the same codebase (against, I advice against that), you may want to have a look to blogs that can be added to your Rails application as Engine such as https://buttercms.com/rails-blog-engine/ or https://github.com/kiddsoftware/rails_blog_engine.
Per the doc:
Engines can be considered miniature applications that provide
functionality to their host applications
So this is a way to deploy it inside your Spree app without resorting to custom code.

Ruby on Rails 3.1 Blog Engines

I see a lot of people asking about Blog Engines, but most of the questions & answers are rather old. Or if they aren't old most of the projects are old. I'm wondering if anyone knows of any Blog Engines that currently support Rails 3.1 or are at least being actively developed to support Rails 3.1.
I would also be interested in seeing any sample applications or blog posts written for Rails 3.1 Blogs. I am going to be adding a blog to one of my websites, and would prefer to simply use a Rails Engine or sample code if there are any good ones out there. I hate reinventing the wheel. Looking for something simple, and not too opinionated so I can modify easily to suit my own needs.
you might want to check out Refinery http://refinerycms.com/engines
doesn't look like they are 3.1 yet, but probably soon
https://github.com/resolve/refinerycms-blog
Your best bet would probably be to use Typo.
Typo is currently using rails 3.0.9. Rails 3.1.0 is still a release candidate so I don't know of any blogging apps using it right now. If you must use rails 3.1.0 then you may have luck grabbing the gem for 3.1.0.rc4 (the newest version) and using typo anyway. Chances are everything will still work.
Hope this helps.
Perhaps Enki is a good fit, currently at Rails 3.0 but there is a github branch with Rails 3.1 support.
http://www.enkiblog.com/
Interestingly BrowserCMS was recently made to be a mountable engine: https://github.com/browsermedia/browsercms/commit/6098699fed2e3dbd65815ac3a5ce0dd6acc103d2
Seem to have a bit of time and experience behind them. More akin to Concrete5 with an inline front end / in context editing facility for users, which can be a real plus.
Im looking into this now and Im getting to conclusion that the best way to do this would be mounting a rack-app(like sinatra) into your rails app, there's various basic sinatra blogs in github to start or copy, not to mention this is fully customizable and I guess very light-weight.. engines will likely have dependencies and may also break when updating gems, a rack app won`t
I wasn't able to find any satisfying solution with engines
other stuff I found:
mounting a rails app inside a rails app: http://blog.dynamic50.com/2010/02/22/rails-3-0-mount-multiple-apps-as-engines/ feels a bit weird(heavy?), but you could mount a fully featured app like enki...
http://planscope.io/blog/2012/03/08/mounting-a-blog-within-a-rails-3-application/ this blogpost talks about using Toto, it seems pretty nice, easy and simple... but the project is not being maintained and it doesn't seem to be able to support a lot of features...
I dunno about using git to post, it makes it really simple but I dunno if I'd like having non-code stuff in my commits
Monologue https://github.com/jipiboily/monologue . From their web:
It is a barebone blog engine for Rails. It is built as a Rails engine and with a focus on keeping very few dependencies to ease it's use in your project. You can also use monologue-markdown which will replace the default editor with a simple Markdown editor.
Seems like pretty active development also.

Would Ruby on Rails suit my work..?

I wanted to make a web site with the following basic features- (1)User registration for buyers and sellers. (2)profile pages (3)A buyer should be able to post work and should get profile links of the corresponding seller who has expertise in that work.
As time progresses i would want to add more features to the site.The freelancer sites where user can post jobs and get bids is the best example of the work.
(1)I want my code to be maintainable as i woud be adding features later on. (2)It should be quick to develop. (3)Resources should be available(not the entire thing, atleast in bits and pieces) for the above requirements and should not be tough to find for future enhancements. (4)Design should be decoupled from the buisness logic as i would outsource the design work.
I was thinking of Ruby on Rails for this work as i have experience in the MVC model and RoR looks cool.I am from the mobility domain so i don't know whether RoR will suit my work
Would RoR suit this purpose.If yes where can i find the resources to the above mentioned requirements.
Thanks
Ruby on Rails would be ideal for this type of website.
Check out some of these resources for info on how to use Ruby on Rails:
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/
http://railscasts.com/
http://www.railsforum.com/
I noticed you are already aware of TeachMeToCode, but there is a tag there for all the Rails 3 tutorials, with some blog tutorials and what looks like the beginning of a series on how to build a del.icio.us clone. Since they are in Rails 3, they would be well worth checking out:
http://teachmetocode.com/screencasts/tag/rails-3/
One of the best tutorials:
http://railsforzombies.org
It will let you have your own point of view quickly.
It depends on with which languages you have experience. Any good MVC framework will do the job just fine but if you like Ruby syntax RoR is definitely a good framework to develop this kind of application.

Ruby Based Blogging Engine

What Rack enabled blogging engines exist? I want to deploy a free blog to heroku and need more customizabilty than the free hosting of Wordpress.com or Blogerty provide.
Also in another note, has anyone tried to port Wordpress to Ruby?
In any special order:
== Rack based
toto
ruby-slippers based on toto
== Jekyll based
Jekyll itself
Octopress blogging in jekyll
spinto jekyll cms
prose jekyll cms
== Rails based
typo one of the oldest in active, with more features but more complex
enki for hackers, basic code
simplelog just main features
mephisto not developed anymore
radiant generic CMS
== Rails engines
refinerycms generic CMS
refinerycms-blog blog engine that integrates with refinerycms
blogit
ComfortableMexicanSofa generic CMS
comfy-blog blog engine that integrates with ComfortableMexicanSofa
Monologue: minimalistic blog engine with very few dependencies.
squeaky
hitchens
kublog
jabe
locomotivecms generic cms
BrowserCMS generic CMS
== Integrate jekyll with Rails
bloggy
If you're a fan of git, you might try Jekyll. It is a static site generator which allows you to do some templating. You don't need a database which makes running it on Heroku even easier.
It's been awhile since I looked into this, but I believe the two major Ruby blog applications are still Mephisto and Typo. They've both been around awhile and appear to still be maintained.
As Heroku has a read-only file system, you may need to do some tweaking to get them to work. Here's a blog post on getting Typo running on Heroku.
You may also want to take a look at Radiant, which is more of a traditional CMS system, but can be used for blogging. There's actually a tutorial on the Heroku blog about getting it up and running on their platform.
Finally, if you want something a bit more lightweight but with full CSS control you may want to take a look at Scanty. It might require you go get your hands dirty, but seems to run great on Heroku. In fact, it's written by one of the founders.
If you want a nice, hackable pure ruby & rack blog: RubySlippers
It used git to manage versioning of your posts and publishing as well. It is built to get a free blog going on heroku in record time!
~end shameless plug
I recently created a platform called Stipes.
It's based on Sinatra and it is very light in terms of required resources.
I installed it on a Raspberry PI recently, for internal, single-user, usage and it works very well. I'm still working on it and any support is welcomed.
If you are not into installing a fully fledged blogging engine, Bloggity may fit your needs, in fact you can use to add a blog to whatever app you may have.

Any Rails projects that allow community blogging?

I've been looking on Github for a Rails project that allows anyone to sign in and add a blog entry.
Has anyone seen something like this?
TYPO is a blogging platform that uses Ruby on Rails:
https://github.com/fdv/typo/wiki looks to have the capability for multiple authors.
The article here gives a good overview of several other RoR blogging platforms that are out there.
IMHO this is quite easy to make. Especially if you use the twitter-auth gem. Just sign-in with your twitter account, write a post and be done with it.

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