We @ heurion / Rails detectives are working on a case which is building an open source content management system that would solve most of the problems identified when building a website using Ruby on Rails. So what we did was to identify what all are necessary to build this system and start working on it. We knew that PHP had quite a lot of strong CMSes in place which lacked in Rails, so we wanted to start our journey building one.
First of all we wanted to start with basics i.e. build a Basic Content managment system by which users should be able to build a basic information website to share their information in the website... So we started with Pages, Menus and Users. All the work users could have done was done by the Admin and the user had nothing to do. So the first set of features of our CMS were
1. Create an admin by default when you run rake db:migrate
2. Allow the admin to add more users/admins
3. Create Pages
4. Create Menu Sections (which we call it as menu sets to group menus to be displayed in as headers / footers, etc.,)
5. Create Menus which can be to link to a page within the website or link to external website.
6. Implement Caching to cache pages
and thats it...the CMS was built and named as AUMCMS -- Faster CMS for Faster Minds
We started using AUM CMS to build some of our client's systems and ended up building one of our own website when we started our UK office. So the first website to be built on AUMCMS was http://www.heurion.co.uk. The success of launching this website gave us more confidence to try the website on other projects, so we started using on our client's projects and the result was http://www.glorionindia.com and http://www.jitari.com .
Again if we see all the features were best utilized in Heuiron's website, however when it came to our client's website...the CMS helped to manage the Content/Static pages part and we extended the CMS to build our own models and pages, as per the requirements of the client. However using the CMS helped us to cut down atleast of 3 - 5 days of work of managing data.
With success of 3 websites gave us to think laterally and identify many more points. Then we came out with more and more requirements that would solve the problem. And we wanted to Coin a differnet name to the CMS and finally came out with RLingCMS. However when we started to re plan on building this system we were much into the Rails 3 world, so we decided to restart the whole implementation using Rails 3
Today RLing CMS can do many more features and includes
- Users Management
- User Details management
- Role Management
- Permission Managment
- Site Settings
- Email templates
- Pages
- Pagelets
- Multi-Page systems
- Page Variables
- Dynamic Forms to be submitted by external users visiting the website
- Models i.e. Capability to create Blogs, Albums, Forums, Products, etc., dynamically on the website
- Views to group and display the models
- Commenting System
- Tagging System
- Many more getting added day by day.
We are gearing up faster to build this system ASAP and get it launched on or before the Second India Ruby Conference 2011 which is to be held on May 28th and 29th at Bangalore, India. That will be our first public display.
We strive to write the best code and also are implementing the BDD techniques to find bugs and issues much in advance. We use RSpec for Models and Cucumber with Capybara and Factory Girl for Controllers and Views.
We hope to deliver a very good product to the Rails world and well it will be OpenSourced.
-- Satish N Kota, CEO, Heurion A.K.A Chief Rails Detective