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An Introduction to Refinery CMS – A Rails Content Management System »

Created at: 22.07.2010 23:53, source: Rails Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

Refinery CMS is an open source Ruby on Rails CMS for small businesses. The project was originally closed source for 4 years at Resolve Digital until it was finally released to the open source community in mid 2009. Refinery focuses on doing things "the Rails way" where possible. This means you don't have to learn too much to start theming it and building your own custom plugins.

What it's it good at?

Refinery is great for small business sites where the client needs to be able to update their website themselves without being bombarded with anything too complicated.

Unlike other content managers, Refinery is truly aimed at the end user making it easy for them to pick up and make changes themselves. The UI is clean and simple so the end user feels at ease and hopefully won't bug the developer with questions!

What Features Does It Have?

Theming support
Easy to use Rails-like plugin generator and plugin architecture
WYSIWYG content editing
Localisation (currently supports 10 langauges)
Page management
Image and File management
Contact form and inquiry management
Search Engine Optimisation

How do I install it?

Firstly install the Refinery CMS gem. This gives you a 'refinerycms' command you can run that creates a new Rails project with Refinery CMS hooked into it.

gem install refinerycms refinerycms path/to/project

Finally change into the project start the web server

cd path/to/project ruby ./script/server

Visit http://localhost:3000 and set up your first Refinery user.

What's coming up in Refinery CMS

Refinery is gearing up for it's 1.0 release with Rails 3.0 support. There is also a Refinery Day coming up where members of the community will be combining efforts to support Rails 3. Check the Google Groups below for details.

Useful Links

Post written by David Jones. David started Refinery CMS in 2004 and is the Technical Director at Resolve Digital, a Rails development company with offices in New Zealand and California.

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The 2010 Ruby Implementation Performance Shootout »

Created at: 20.07.2010 04:28, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

Hot on the heels of his Windows Ruby implementation shootout comes Antonio Cangiano's Great Ruby Shootout of July 2010 where Antonio pits 8 different Ruby implementations against each other in a performance shootout!

Antonio's findings and observations are interesting and well worth a read (particularly the parts about memory consumption) but if you're in a hurry, the conclusion is that Ruby 1.9.2 RC2 and JRuby 1.5.1 are almost joint first place for fastest Ruby implementation (but 1.9.2 takes it by a hair.) Ruby 1.9.1 and Maglev are then very close behind.

Redmine 1.0 Released: Ruby’s Top Project Management Webapp Hits Maturity »

Created at: 19.07.2010 22:53, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

http://redmineblog.com/articles/redmine-1.0.0-released/ (or on Ruby Inside)

It's out, it's out. Redmine 1.0 is released!

The first release candidate for Redmine 1.0 has been released to Rubyforge. This is a major release which includes many new features and bugfixes since the last major release, (0.9 in 2010-01-09).

This is still considered a release candidate (RC) release. The code has been stabilized over the past 6 weeks and we believe it is ready to be tested in production, but there still might be some rough edges. We are using this release to get some for final feedback, both for 1.0.1 (bug fixes) and our next major release 1.1.0.

Eric Davis

I don't understand the odd release candidate vs "1.0 is released" situation, but I've been following Eric's progress for months and he's put a lot of effort into making Redmine - a Ruby and Rails-based project management system used by the Ruby, RubySpec, Puppet and Typo3 projects, amongst others.

Free “Secrets of Superstar Programming Productivity” Videos from Giles Bowkett »

Created at: 16.07.2010 01:38, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/07/secrets-of-superstar-programmer.html (or on Ruby Inside)

Giles Bowkett (Ruby Inside's top Ruby presenter of 2008) has released a series of free videos called "Secrets of Superstar Programming Productivity" that could interest some of you:

Flow (22 minutes)
Metrics (17 minutes)
Habit (22 minutes)

Giles' style isn't for everyone, but he shares some great tips in these videos and they've been very well received on Twitter. Enjoy!

Euruko 2010 Presentations »

Created at: 14.07.2010 12:39, source: Ruby Inside, tagged: Miscellaneous

Florian Hanke got in touch to tell me that presentations and photos from the recent Euruko 2010 European Ruby conference are now online.

http://euruko2010.heroku.com/ shows off the presentations awesomely! Videos and slides are available for most of them and the video/audio is of a high quality.

Highlights include:

Continuous Integration and Why You Need It — Nicolas (foca) Sanguinetti
Getting and loading code: current state of packaging & best practices — Mislav Marohnić
Building a search engine with Ruby — Florian Hanke
Why Bundler? — Yehuda Katz
Remodelling a Facebook game — Tim Lossen
Putting the static back into Ruby — Tomasz Stachewicz
Anatomy of Ruby i18n — Sven Fuchs
Matz's Keynote — Matz!

More can be found on Vimeo and if you'd rather just read a write up of what happened, Markus Prinz has writeups for Day 1 and Day 2 of the conference.