Josh Huckabee

Few months ago, we connected Joomla and Ruby on Rails.
We were in need of a banner system. Joomla have a fairly good one, AdBannerPlus and developping one in Ruby on Rails is still a good work to do.

I tricked the Joomla CMS to present only banner ads. I changed the template and on the RoR site, I load from an internal callback to the Joomla system.

Simple, efficient and transparent. It's not because you have an hammer in your hand that everything look like a nail. You have to adapt an leverage the technologies around you.

Have a good day.

What a great piece of flypaper! I, too, googled Drupal and Ruby, and landed here. I'm guessing that my goal is the same as that of many other searchers--finding a CMS with many of Drupal's terrific features, but implemented in Ruby.

The reasons for looking for a Ruby-based implementation include:

• Capability: Ruby is powerful, and applications written in it can be extended in interesting ways, including adding to existing classes without rewriting them, and construction of useful domain-languages to solve domain-specific problems.
   
• Familiarity: It takes a lot of time to learn a language and become seriously proficient at it. Ruby is pretty unique in that it can be used for day-to-day scripting and for serious applications. That makes it reasonable to think of it as possibly the "one language to bind them all", so you can spend your time getting seriously proficient in one language, rather than acquiring a surface familiarity with many. (Each has its own rewards, but real mastery lets you do so much more.)
   
• Confidence: Any extensions you want to make will most likely require extensive refactoring. Otherwise, they probably would already be implemented. Given the nearly-inevitable desire to something of that kind, one day, it makes sense to look for an implementation that is written in a language you are familiar with, which you know to be powerful enough to do anything you might ever want to do, so can undertake the task with confidence.

  Hopefully, that helps to explain why folks keep finding your page after a search. (I'm grateful for the pointers to Mephisto and Radiant CMS. Apparently, they are somewhat equivalent to Drupal, so they're worth a strong look. In return, I felt I owed you a semi-choherent explanation!)
  :_)

I agree with you on Ruby's power via its extensibility and flexibility. The natural syntax of Ruby lends itself to becoming that one language you can learn and do everything with.

The only reason there isn't an equivalent of Drupal in Ruby at this point is because of the maturity and popularity of the PHP language compared with Ruby and Rails. Given time, we will eventually see one of the Rails CMS's rise to the level of adoption as Drupal. (Although I admit that predicting the future of technology is pointless.)

I also failed to mention RailFrog as another alternative Rails CMS to Drupal. It has been in development for sometime, but I think Mephisto and Radiant are still the front runners.

For me, an implementation of Drupal in Ruby using the Rails framework makes perfect sense. What people like most about Drupal is the easy installation and the wonderful availability of off the shelf modules that allow for quick customization to the type of site you are trying to build. While Radiant CMS and Mephisto are quite good at what they do (simple blogs, community web sites, etc) for those that are trying to build much more involved sites that might include, for instance, eCommerce components, photo galleries, tag clouds, social networking elements, etc, the availability of modules is key.

I think an implementation of Drupal in Rails would allow for the creation of those off the shelf modules much more quickly. Another thing to consider is that it opens up the Drupal experience to not only the platforms that can run Rails, but also to Java shops where it can now be successfully deployed using JRuby. I think the same developer community that brought us so many great Drupal modules and themes over the years can be brought to life in the Rails community as well and possibly even quicker given the bonus that Rails offers much better facilities for tests. With the ability to have tests for each module, quality can only improve and regression testing of your site when a new module is introduced into the site would be a no brainer.

I've been looking for a good challenge. I may take this on myself :--)

I landed on your site searching for Drupal and Rails. The reasons:
1) I admire Drupal for it's flexibility, stability, extensibility, community, deployments, etc.
2) I refuse to develop anything in PHP. It->makes->me->shiver.
3) I'd love to have a a quality CMS to build off of in Rails rather than the daunting task of implementing everything myself.

The answer appears to be at least a year off, but thanks for referring me to the front-runners. The mission of my Google search is accomplished.

Like the rest of you I googled Ruby and Drupal and got here.

Drupal has paid off for me because I can get a lot done quickly with it. But it doesn't do CRUD well, which is where Ruby On Rails comes in.

But what I am really interested in is in using Drupal as it stands together with a bespoke RoR application (made by me).

I would use CSS to make the HTML from each site look the same and then some Apache magic to make them both look like they were being served out from very nearly the same URL.

This would seem to meet the DRY criteria better than attempting to rewrite Drupal (!!!!!!) in Ruby.

What do you think? Am I missing something? Authentication/authorisation perhaps.

Hmmmm. What i want is slightly different I guess:

I want to leverage the all the goodies Drupal brings with a new app I want to build in RoR.

I want to use Drupal as is (not re-develop it in RoR), but have my RoR app fully integrated with it. Essentially, I have workgroups that all need to use the same app, and I want to have authentication, access controls, modularity (blocks and nodes on drupal-speak) be populated by my RoR app. Why implement notes in my app when Drupal has blogs? Why implement photo attachments in my app when Gallery integrates with drupal already?

I don't want to develop the app as a stand-alone, or as a php Drupal module, since I can do it so much more easil and quickly on RoR.

I'm mostly looking for a platform for doing highly customizable CMS solutions. Drupal seems to provide this, and it seems like oftentimes people don't even need to touch PHP code. In Rails again touching the code seems like a lot of fun, but with a tight schedule, you might not have time to reinvent the wheel... thus Rails comes in when Drupal's flexibility isn't enough, which usually means web apps that anyways need to be made from scratch.

Correct me if I'm making the wrong assumptions... ;-)

Actually, drupal is the best cms out there.

I've browsed here via google because i was looking for how to power up drupal with RoR, if that is possible and is not the pain to do so. I am thinking of using Drupal for all content management and power it up with RoR. Does anyone know for any good example of such website or some tutorials perhaps?

I guess the responses vary for the reasons of searching Drupal and Ruby. Developers are looking to coagulate the usage and functionalities shared between the two or make comparisons. I guess this post has assisted as it is allowing those searching to make it clearer.

There are many joomla 1.5 tutorial articles available out there that are comparing Joomla to other CMS and a lot of searches are for 'joomla wordpress' the common reason is converting Joomla into a blog or a wordpress into more functioning CMS