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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T11:10:13+00:00

I want to make a community based site, which is Drupal’s strength. However I

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I want to make a community based site, which is Drupal’s strength. However I also want to try other frameworks, especially Rails.

One of the best things about drupal is its huge modules library. If I were to switch to Rails, would I be able to find similar functionality freely available as plugins, or would I have to rebuild?

Does Rails have the equivalent of (as plugins or gems):

CCK/Fields?
Node Reference?
Views / Views Relationships?
PathAuto?
Threaded Commenting?
Multisite Functionality?
Apache Solr (or equivalent) Integration?

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’m afraid you’ll probably hear this answer a lot, but it’s not a suitable comparison.

    Drupal is a ultimately a CMS, Rails is a framework. Apples to oranges, or perhaps even Apple Juice to oranges. Out of the box, you fire up Drupal and it does ‘things’: it has a database structure, the concept of nodes, interfaces blah, blah. If you fire up Rails you have an empty project.

    As far as I know there isn’t a “Drupal-on-Rails” project that would be a suitable equivalent. However, I can attest to the fact that there is an awful lot of Ruby/Rails community and O/S work out there and you might find something suitable. I’d also say that the level of modularity in Ruby and Rails tends to mean that the range of plugins/modules/gems one can use is much greater.

    My personal $0.02. If Drupal does what you need, just use Drupal: it’s mature and has a great community. It’s never a good idea to try to port Project X over to a new language as a learning exercise because you’ll inevitable fall into the “Well that’s how it’s done in language X!” trap and become disenchanted with the new system.

    If you’re wanting to learn Rails (which you should, it’s awesome) I’d suggest you’d be best working on a small project and seeing what the ecosystem offers before deciding if it’s suitable for the needs of your bigger projects.

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