Need Your Help - Any Off-the-Shelf Blog Solutions for a RoR WebApp You'd Recommend?

June 9th, 2013

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!

Ken Woodruff Software Architect

June 10th, 2013

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.

Jesal Gadhia

June 9th, 2013

For RoR checkout:

locomotivecms.com

refinerycms.com

radiantcms.org

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.

Vijay MD Founder Chefalytics, Co-owner Bite Catering Couture, Independent consultant (ex-McKinsey)

June 9th, 2013

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

Joanan Hernandez CEO & Founder at Mollejuo

June 10th, 2013

Marlina,

If still after all the suggestions you're not convince, I'll pitch in:

Wordpress

Is it clear? :-)

Cheers!