I recently used ActiveAdmin for the first time to toss together a very quick admin panel for a friend’s site and was incredibly impressed with how incredibly fast and simple it was to set up, and how nice it looked right out if the box.
I always find little projects that could benefit with a central website to coordinate information, and I was wondering if anyone knew of a similar gem for snapping together an entire website in this same super-simple, fast and nice-looking way. Something generic that would work particularly well for websites that have structured content/data, but no real “business logic” (for example, something that could be used to organize/display/update information & event schedules for a neighborhood voulteer group, PTA bake sale, bar trivia night, etc)?
I know I could just scaffold out everything and have it be purely functional in five minutes, but that isn’t the kind of thing you can expect a PTA bake sale mom & friends to use, and I don’t really have the time to devote to this kind of thing, I’m just doing it to be helpful.
I’m particularly interested in something that can be casually thrown together in an hour or two without a great deal of effort (a la ActiveAdmin) and pushed up to heroku, but has enough clean, pre-canned styling and interactivity to look clean and nice right out of the box (javascripty drop down menus, reasonable page content presentation, etc).
I know there are non-rails answers for this, but I’m particularly interested in rails (or even just ruby), so I can add bits and pieces from time to time.
I did some google searching, but unfortunately I’m not sure what to even search for, which leads to question 2: are there any curated repositories of gems of this kind where I can browse first before asking on a site like this and taking up people’s time?
In both cases, thank you very much for the help and education!
Try your pick from the Content Management & Blogging section on ruby-toolbox.com as Brian suggested.
Refinery CMS is quite a nice CMS-System. There are a couple of Engines available to solve a few common problems.
But the truth is there is nothing in the rails world compared to what you get with wordpress (ease of use, extensibility etc.).