Yeah, you're right. You can make a CMS with RoR, but it's not a CMS at all lol I suppose we can group all the RoR CMS' in that category though.
Can anybody quantify what the word 'best' envelopes out of interest? Is it because it is best as it is feature rich, or because it is free, or because it is easy to use....
Anyone else here write their own CMS? I did it just because at the time I was planning my site, I couldn't find an "off the shelf" package that would perform how I wanted.
Any chance of looking at your custom CMS? Are you now reselling this as a package to others or was it so specific it suits only your purpose?
There are two versions actually. The original, highly-custom version is at http://www.fortypoundhead.com. It was built to house tech articles, and has recently has a news module and basic forums added. I've been toying with a public version, which is a ground-up rebuild, incorporating lessons learned during the building of the first version. It can be viewed at http://incognito.fortypoundhead.com. More of a portal, but the aim is to be very versatile. Admittedly, I haven't had much time to work on it as of the last month, so it's kind of at a standstill.
Looks really nice indeed. Is it portable - ie can be used by others easily? Or is the back end quite complex in comparison to something like Joomla. Im interested as Im toying with the whole idea of custom building my own new site (which requires a ton of functionality and design)....or picking up an off the shelf CMS such as Drupal....but I can't find any that will give me quite exactly what I am after. What would you suggest after encountering this and building your own...was it worth it?
Thanks for the kind words! I've actually been quite happy building my own. I find that if something does go sideways with the site, I know exactly what to check in order to fix it, whereas with a off the shelf package, I have to sift through thousands of lines of code in order to find the issue. The underlying code has been purposely made as simple as possible, with at least 37% reduction in sheer code volume from the previous version. Also, the code is designed to be very modular. Want new content? Simply drop in a reference. All the theming is taken care of via CSS, which makes for better SEO, quicker changes, lightweight footprint, and easy administration. So if you wanted to skin it with a holiday theme, it'd take about 3 seconds to change the entire site via the web interface. Now, the down side. For others, anyway. It's written in ASP. yep. It's being developed in what I am most comfortable with. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time resources to move over to LAMP style programming. I'm hoping to make good on New Years resolutions, though, and learn that platform.
Most people are afraid of telling that they like WP as this is basic, so they cast their vote on Drupal and Joomla to make them a bit intermediate. On the real scene WP has the votes.