New to Rails 3? Check out the Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial book and screencast.

A book and screencast series showing you how to develop and deploy industrial-strength Rails apps in a direct, step by step way. The screencast series includes 12 lessons over more than 15 hours! Get the best "over the shoulder" experience of following what a top Rails 3 developer does when building an app today. Click here to learn more.

An Introduction to Refinery CMS - A Rails Content Management System

By Peter Cooper — July 22nd, 2010 — 1 Comment

In 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

Refinery CMS Website
GitHub Repository
Official Demo Site
Refinery CMS Google Group
Official IRC Channel

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.