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.
Related
I have a Ruby on Rails application and want to include a blog inside the application.
I was wondering what's the best way to do that. I don't want to have a link to an external blog. I want the blog integrated in my application. Also i don't have the time to programm the blog functionality. I want to use existing solutions.
What's the best way to accomplish that? Any recommendations? What are the best solutions?
The best way to include one application within another is by using engines. This might help you Ruby on Rails 3.1 Blog Engines
Perhaps Typo would address your needs installed as a Rails Engine.
Since nobody has done it so far I need to mention here that the spirit of Rails is to make everything friendly enough so that you can code your own.
It's a bit more work but then your blog module fits right in with the rest of the app.
What ruby based forum software would you recommend for integration into an existing rails application and allows single sign-on? I have seen many suggestions in posts for forum software that is no longer maintained (2008 and earlier).
Beast is the most current one I know of, and I'm sure it's the one you are referencing.
The rest is more of a side note, but, when I first got into rails, i asked similar questions, aka, what is the best blog, cms, forum, etc to use? As it turns out, the Rails community as a whole is interested in use cases that fit outside the plug-n-play web apps, so most people will end up rolling their own to fit their needs exactly if they find occasion to build such an app in Rails. The good news is that I think that I remember hearing that beast is like 800 lines of code, so it can't been too burdensome to either upgrade out of 2.2ish rails or just copy over the logic you need for your forum.
Thredded is very actively maintained!
Thredded is a Rails engine, so it is very easy to integrate it into an existing app.
http://github.com/radar/rboard
Rboard is really pretty awesome. :)
I always refer to Ruby Toolbox on what the rails comunity prefers.
Here's a good reference http://ruby-toolbox.com/categories/forum_systems.html
Based on the list there are two projects
Rboard - last commit 25 days ago
altered_beast - last commit 12 months ago
I agree with Jed Schneider, in the end most rails guys will roll out their own to fit the exact needs.
Forem and Discourse look promising:
https://github.com/radar/forem
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
I have a Rails 2.3 application which I would like to extract into a plugin, or engine. The application has user authentication, and basic cms capabilities supported by ancestry plugin.
I want to extract the logic for the application into a plugin/engine so that I can use this code for future projects, with a different "skin" or "theme" if required.
I'm not entirely sure I actually understand the difference between plugin and engine concepts, so that would be a good first point.
What is the best approach, are there any good starting points, links, explanations, examples that I should follow. Also, with the release of R3 to consider, is there anything that I should be aware of for that, with regards to plugins etc.
I am going to start off by watching Ryan's http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
but obviously thats over a year old now, so one of the challenges I'm faced with is finding the most up to date and relevant information on this subject.
All tips and help gratefully received.
Actually, converting an application is pretty straigtforward. Just create a plugin-folder, put an app-folder inside containing all yor model-views-controllers folders, and that's it.
You will have to manage your migrations yourself though. Also you have to define rake-tasks to copy files to your public folder. I think the railscasts is still pretty up-to-date, if anything it is now easier in rails 2.3.
Good luck!
[EDIT: for rails3] Rails 3 engines are very clean and powerful. Check this gist by Jose Valim.
You will probably be better off focusing your engine on Rails 3, as opposed to trying to make it compatible for Rails 2 and Rails 3, due to the backwards incompatible changes. Here is a more up to date tutorial for Rails 3
also the book "Crafting Rails applications" by Rails Core member Jose Valim, has a good chapter on it. Int he shows how to use his tool EngineX which generates a Rails 3 engine structure, so you can more easily create engines for your Rails 3 projects. His gem devise is also a rails engine which is also nice, because you can easily customize it by copying the templates into the application directory, and allowing you to subclass the controllers that you want to customize more.
Writing a plugin is an entirely different process than writing an app, if you already have your app code it should be straightforward converting it into a plugin.
Consider that if you use third-party plugins in your app it could get pretty messy.
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.
I'm looking for a way to modularize Rails applications. As I've seen there is no built-in way of accomplishing it. I've found different plugins/core hacks but I feel untrusted about the way they work and their maturity.
Do you have any experience on this?
So far I found this ones:
Desert: http://github.com/pivotal/desert
Rails engines: http://rails-engines.org/
Rails engines are part of the current stable rails 2.X and so aren't really "hacks" anymore. They seem like a good fit if you want to add fairly course-grained application functionality to an application - a good example might be adding a blog or CMS-style functionality to another application. Checkout the railscast on engines here: http://railscasts.com/episodes/149-rails-engines
If you're looking to modularize on the front end - more "widget" style, you might want to look at cells: http://github.com/apotonick/cells/