From: Sascha Ebach <se@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T02:26:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby's Killer App - every language has one

Hello Javier,

thanks for your interest. I am working on the CMS as time permits and 
Rails lets me develop it very fast. I am trying to get my development 
time funded by clients, because than i could really do full time 
development on it. I know if that can happen by the end of September. 
We'll see...

Javier Leija wrote:
> I like the idea. I spent most of last week searching for a good CMS
> and I was disapointed that all the good ones like mambo, wordpress and
> tikiwiki are developed in PHP. Over the weekend I had to learn a
> little bit of PHP, enough to develop my own wiki component for mambo
> (a mambot as they call their plugins). But you know what? I din't like
> PHP. It does the job and it is simple enough if you know C++ but it
> just doesn't feel anything like Ruby. However I was very impressed by
> the architecture in mambo (www.mamboserver.com). Those guys did a
> great job with mambo. It is very very easy to install, to add plugins
> or new components, to develop extensions, etc. and, it looks great. I
> just wish that they had implemented it in Ruby.

Yes, mambo is a nice piece of software (feature wise). It has been 
around pretty long. I am looking at other packages for inspiration, too.

- ezPublish
- drupal
- mambo
- Plone
- and others

By inspiration I mean looking at features that are useful and make 
working with the cms a pleasure. Featurewise I would like to have the 
following:

- Versioning
- Workflows
- Tree based contentobjects and navigation (s. ezPublish or drupal) and 
automatic sitemaps
- multiple websites per installation
- shop functionality
- multiple uses, i.e. every installation should be configurable to be a 
mixture of a blog/wiki/shop/news-site/portal/... (install ezPublish to 
see what i mean)
- WYSIWYG editor for textareas (Kupu) and/or full page editing via 
bitflux editor (mozilla only)
- modular (of course) plugins etc.
- really great UI, probably making use of XMLHttpRequest (like Gmail) s. 
http://www.sitepoint.com/blog-post-view.php?id=191776
- and, show that you can do all this with 1/5 of the code u would need 
with Java ;)
- make it Open Source

among other things. I only have the tree based navigation figured out 
yet (and a very early UI), but I have only started. If I can get funded 
I plan to implement much of this functionality _this_ year. I have a 
good feeling about this, but don't hold me to it ;)

> I think Ruby with a clean CMS architecture like the one in mambo could
> really make a difference for users and developers.

It always leaves me completely baffled that there is not _one_ such 
package for Ruby. But I don't exactly know what you mean by 
architecture. I think you mean the way you can work with the product 
(workflow)

> I'd like to know how your efforts are going and maybe even help you
> with some of the implementation. So please keep me posted.

Thanks for the offer. I am looking into rails right now and so far it 
proofed to be really useful for what I plan. When I (really) got the 
hang of it I will probably put up a project website. We'll see how it 
goes from there. But I want to have a little head start to define 
architecture and make the CMS fairly usable before posting the first 
version. I will surely announce it here if all goes well.

The next 2 weeks are client projects ...

Cheers
-- 
Sascha Ebach