Saral: Eureka! Moment
Every inventor/Entrepreneur has a Eureka moment when he/she gets an idea about a new product/service/business. Here is the story of my Eureka moment.
Few months ago one of my clients approached me with a project to create a multi-lingual advertising portal. It really warranted a fully fledged Content Management System that can allow simultaneous management and publishing of content is multiple languages. Being a total Ruby-On-Rails convert, I insisted on implementing the portal on the Rails platform. And so I started my hunt for a Content Management System that is either implemented in Rails OR provided an API to integrate seamlessly with a Rails.
I found plenty of references to content management systems being implemented in Rails. See: http://vpanchal.blogspot.com/2007/07/top-20-ruby-on-rails-content-management.html.
Sadly I could not find a Rails CMS that can come even close to Joomla, Drupal OR Plone. These open-source CMS are matured, time-hardened and choke full of features. Reluctantly I decided to drop Rails and picked up Joomla.
Read the this blog to find out about my two nightmarish weeks with Joomla,,.
The next two weeks was a roller-coaster ride while I created a prototype with Joomla. It was impressive how quickly I was able to develop a portal using Joomla’s out-of-the-box features and 100s of plugins and extensions. The nightmare really begun when I wanted to customize certain aspects of the site and add new functionality. In Joomla everything is done through configuration. It makes it really hard when you want to do something that can not be done through its administrative interface. It really turn Rails “Convention over Configuration” on its tail to “Configuration Over Convention”.
After a while I got tired of clicking buttons and links on the Joomla’s clunky and slow administrative interface. And I started looking into Joomla’s PHP code to see if I can sneak in my changes directly into the database.
That is when a light bulb went on !! Almost everything that I was doing in Joomla, I could do it better in Rails. So why not create a CMS that follows the Rails way of creating simple, elegant software that is easy-to-use and fun to work with.
That got me started thinking about what a modern CMS should offer and how can it enhance the Rails framework for developing content-rich websites and applications.
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