Hi All - I have a ecomm web app and we want to get up a blog as soon as possible. Does anyone have any recommendations to share, along with notable limitations if any? Ideally a solution with strong social integration features. Thanks so much!
I see no good reason to integrate a blog with you main RoR app these days, and plenty of reasons not to. Wordpress is an excellent choice, simply host it at a custom sub-domain, e.g. If your main site is www.example.com put it at blog.example.com. While there are many great Wordpress themes I'd stick to a basic one--by keeping the blog layout simple it should be straightforward to include enough of your main site's branding (logos, colors, fonts) to make it feel like a coherent whole. Save your Design Fu for the main site. One big advantage of hosting your blog elsewhere than your app: it will stay up during any app outages so you can use it to communicate with users.
--Ken
Sent from my iPad
Anonymous
June 9th, 2013
Definitely Wordpress. There are thousands of themes and plugins so even a
nontechnical user can easily customize.
Braulio Carreno
Software Engineer at ActBlue Technical Services
June 9th, 2013
The answer depends if you have a Rails developer:
Shopify is a SaaS solution for e-commerce, you can build your online store without a developer. The software that implements Shopify is open source: Spree. Which is an option if you have a Rails developer.
The fastest way to start a blog is wordpress.com. Again, you can do this without a developer. The wordpress software is also open source, but it's written in PHP. There aren't ready-to-use solutions to build a blog in Rails.
However, this shouldn't be a problem: you can create an hybrid store and if you link your 2 sites properly, your customers won't notice they're touching 2 different platforms. The data from a wordpress.com blog can be easily exported in the future.
With RoR not hard to roll your own if you already have users and everything
else set up. Just create a model with the right form fields, although
things like RSS would take a little bit of work.
If you want something that's out of the box that's more of a CMS but you'll
need to integrate, you can try any of these
http://www.exist.com/blog/five-popular-ruby-rails-based-cms#.UbUO2UCPN58
Stephen Peters
Looking for the next challenge and opportunity
June 10th, 2013
http://wordpress.com/
You can be up and running today on their free or paid service.
You can also host your own wordpress installation. I do a lot of wordpress
setups for people. It's remarkable what you can do in wordpress with
relatively little time and money.
- Steve
Stephen Peters
Looking for the next challenge and opportunity
June 11th, 2013
We're all friends here. While it's true that I am a paid consultant in
WordPress, I'd be happy to get together and show you how it works and
answer questions if that would be helpful, no charge or obligation.
Plenty of people have helped me along the way, always happy to give back.
- Steve
Anonymous
June 9th, 2013
Hi Marlina - I second (third) wordpress. The community support for everything you will need is excellent. You can run both on the same domain and even have them on separate machines. Your users will not see the difference.
Michael Richards
GoMotive CEO (mobile client retention system) & PRR Chief Operating Officer
June 9th, 2013
I've heard very good things about vBulletin as it is highly flexible with
lots of features. We will be integrating it sometime soon.
Let me know what you learn.
Thx.
Sent from my iPhone
Michael Richards
206-696-3830