Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Designer CMS on Rails

Paul Jarvis (of twothirty fame) and I have been dis­cussing an idea over the last few days, cen­tered around this con­cept: many design­ers (espe­cially those who, like us, believe in and evan­ge­lize web stan­dards for our projects, and care about build­ing user-friendly inter­faces) bemoan the absence of a CMS that meets the fol­low­ing requirements:

• Easy to incor­po­rate into exist­ing projects
• Easy to inte­grate with new projects
• Easy to tweak with­out being a programmer
• Easy to use (for design­ers, devel­op­ers and clients)

So we started chat­ting about this prob­lem in more detail, since the only solu­tions either of us have found thus far (for projects requir­ing a CMS) is to cre­ate some­thing from scratch (time-consuming if you are a pro­gram­mer or have one on your team, and usu­ally expen­sive if you choose/need to hire a devel­oper — for design­ers with no pro­gram­ming knowl­edge, the lat­ter is almost always the case), attempt to cus­tomize one of the many open source CMS projects (which seem to have a long way to go), or hack/bend/twist blog-oriented sys­tems (which is a less-than-elegant approach on many lev­els) such as Word­Press, Textpat­tern or Mov­able­Type.

After agree­ing on the poor state of the CMS union, we decided that some­thing needs to be built from the ground up to tar­get these spe­cific require­ments, as well as some oth­ers, including:

• Quick setup/configuration
• Wide com­pat­i­bil­ity with web servers/platforms
• Fast/efficient
• Cus­tomiz­able UI (e.g. make it look like a client’s site)
• More we haven’t yet thought of

Paul and I dis­cussed a com­bi­na­tion of Rails and AJAX as the per­fect com­pan­ions to web stan­dards, and since nei­ther of us are seri­ous devel­op­ers (we can both do a few fancy things with PHP, but that doesn’t really count for a project of this scope), I decided it would be inter­est­ing to find out what I could about the Rails world — being a front-end designer, I haven’t yet been able to ded­i­cate enough time to Rails to really under­stand how to use it, though that’s still on my list (espe­cially after using Base­camp and now Back­pack so suc­cess­fully, such great exam­ples of the frame­work have me sold on its ben­e­fits com­pletely). A brief dis­cus­sion with David Heine­meier Hans­son about poten­tial Rails devel­op­ers resulted in a short descrip­tion of the con­cept on a pub­lic Back­pack page (what else?) which David was kind enough to pub­li­cize on the Rails blog, with the hopes of gen­er­at­ing inter­est from one or more developers.

Is this a project that inter­ests you, either as a user or a con­trib­u­tor? Are you a Rails or AJAX devel­oper inter­ested in col­lab­o­rat­ing with a few of the bet­ter design­ers within the web stan­dards world to design and develop an answer to this missing-link in the web stan­dards devel­op­ment toolbox?

We’d love to hear your thoughts, com­ments, con­cerns, ideas, and any­thing else I’ve left out if you care to share them — I’d love to see this done in Rails, espe­cially as Rails is pick­ing up speed and pop­u­lar­ity day by day, and this kind of project (whether even­tu­ally sold or purely dis­trib­uted for the greater good) would both ben­e­fit from the press Rails is receiv­ing as well as add to it.

This item was posted by Dan Rubin on Friday, June 10th, 2005.

Categories:

• Uncategorized

You can follow comments on this item via the RSS 2.0 feed.

Comments are closed.