I have a website that has product pages(dynamic) and corporate pages(fairly static). Both are coded in Rails. This means the marketing team has to involve the dev team to make any changes to the static pages. To address this issue, I am thinking about migrating the static pages to a CMS.
I am considering following approaches:
WordPress + Jekyll
- Marketing team maintains the static pages at a private WordPress site (eg: foo.wordpress.com).
- When the marketing team is ready to deploy the change, a command line tool converts the WP pages to static pages using Jekyll and commits the changes to a git repository.
- The changes to the git repository are uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket associated with the raills application asset.
- Marketing team is already familiar with WP and it is quite easy to find a good WP theming resource.
Rails based CMS : Locomotive/Radiant
- The CMS resides within the rails app.
Has anybody done this type of deployment. In your opinion which approach is better of the two and why?
I prefer having the CMS integrated in with the Rails app. This way you only have one layout and set of stylesheets to maintain.
Finding a Rails based CMS that makes it easy to integrate into your own application and works the way you want it to might be a bit more challenging. Most of the ones I’ve seen, the CMS is the application and you have to use its hooks to customize things.
With that said, it isn’t that hard to build a simple CMS to use within your own application. WordPress uses tinymce as the wysiwyg, which isn’t that hard to get working in a Rails app. Also, take a look at Refinery, as it may fit your needs just fine.