Tag: Refinery CMS

Why CMS Is So Popular Among Webmasters?

Posted on by Jay

CMS (Content Management System) which came as blogging platform has evolved a lot and quickly won the heart of webmasters/entrepreneurs, and became the utmost choice for all types of websites, whether it would be basic content management site or massive ecommerce application one.

From the discovery of CMS, It begins a new battle between CMS and traditional website.

CMS-vs-traditional-website

Today, I am going to share few points why it is so popular among website owners.

Less dependency on developer and easy maintenance:

Once you develop theme or application on CMS you don’t have to rely on upon your developer excessively.

You can easily maintain and update your content even if you have very little or no knowledge of front- end languages, scripting languages, database or designing software.

On the other side if you go for traditional website, then you have to fully depend on your developer even for smaller to small changes.

 Saves Money and Time:

Most of CMS are Open Source. It simply means no need to pay a single penny for CMS installation on your domain.

As I said earlier that it is very easy to update content, publish page and lots of customization.

So it can be done by the webmaster himself without having any technical knowledge or without taking any help of developers.

In this manner, CMS helps to spare your expense as well as your time.

Search Engine friendly:

All modern CMS provide lots of plug-in which simplify your SEO task. However, custom website needs lots of attentions and work to make your application or website search engine friendly.

Provides Dynamic Platform:

Almost all CMS allow extensions like forum, poll, e-commerce application, blog management, video integration and lots more, which make the application dynamic.

However, if you go for dynamic HTML/CSS website require flash, animation and lots of Javascript code, which make your website slow and not so search engine friendly.

Huge Developer community and tutorial support:

One of the biggest concerns for many webmasters is that when they stuck they cannot take help developer’s community or tutorial guidelines.

So they don’t chose technology where it is hard to find proficient people on that technology. Whereas, all popular CMS provide community, which is quite large and it is extremely helpful to find experienced folks.

CMS also provide features like content scheduling and republishing, additional plugin that make your website compatible to any device, and third party integration; on the flip side you need lots of money and time to do the same on your traditional website.

If you think, CMS is an obvious champ, then again, you are wrong. Reasons, CMS itself as well as its plugins are open source, so they are highly vulnerable to all types of outside attackers.

It is strongly advisable to update your plugin and CMS version regularly and do the proper security testing for your application. Also after arrival of HTML5, traditional website design definitely took a big leap.

You can get free security testing report at no expense. At Andolasoft , we deliver customize and affordable wordpress support and development service.

No doubts the fight between CMS and Traditional website stays unending. Have something to add to this topic? Share it in the comments.

Why Refinery CMS is chosen to be best among all other Rails CMS?

Posted on by Srikant M.

Refinery-CMS(1)What is a CMS?

A content management system or CMS is a computer program that allows a user to publish, edit and modifying of the content through a editor. CMS often used for websites & blogs to avoid the hand coding and provide easy to use interface so that anybody can manage the content without depending on a programmer.

Here, I want to specify one of the popular Ruby on Rails CMS – RefineryCMS. There are some other CMS available in Ruby On Rails like BrowserCMS, LocomotiveCMS, Radiant CMS, etc…

RefineryCMS is an open source content management system written in Ruby on Rails with jQuery used as the JavaScript library. It is perfect for creating custom content manageable websites. If you need to quickly create an informational site that can be easily edited, consider using a content management system.

Key features of RefineryCMS are:

  • 100% free and open source
  • Super simple and easy to use
  • Slick, clean user interface
  • Modular and extendable
  • Design flexibility
  • Multilingual

RefineryCMS is popular because of following reasons :

  • Built with Ruby on Rails
  • Refinery is the most user-friendly for a non-technical end-user
  • Installing RefineryCMS is very easy
  • Supports creating of custom engines
  • There are tons of engines, plugins and extensions available
  • Strong community for support
  • Easier to integrate into existing rails project or the other way round
  • Includes Devise as authentication
  • Has a pretty admin control panel

See Also : How to create a form page in Refinery CMS app

Do you like this blog? I’d love to hear something from you. Thanks for sharing your comments.

Creation of a New Rails App using Refinery CMS

Posted on by Jay

Refinery CMSRefineryCMS is a powerful Ruby on Rails CMS. Here I have created a blog-cms application using Ruby 1.9.3 and Rails 3.2.8

Step#1
Install the RefineryCms gem version 2.0.8 from the terminal

gem install refinerycms

Create a new rails application with ‘MySQL’ database using the command line in the terminal

refinerycms myblog -d mysql

It will automatically run the following commands

bundle install</div>
<div>rake  db:create db:migrate</div>
<div>rake  db:seed

Step#2
Go to the app on the terminal

cd myblog

Step#3
Start the rails server in the terminal

rails s

Step#4
Open a browser window and navigate to “http://localhost:3000/”
The signup window pops up to prompt you to create your first Refinery user. This is the Superuser of Refinery, which has the ability to create other users.
That’s it!
The application runs now.
Other useful information to customize Refinery CMS application

  • You can change the “Site Name” to a name of your choice currently displaying in the home page

In “config/initializers/refinery/core.rb”
config.site_name = “Company Name”

  • You can customize the design or functionality

To override files from refinerycms to the existing app we have to use the below commands

rake refinery:override view=file_name

Here are some examples:

rake refinery:override view=pages/home</div>
<div>rake refinery:override view=refinery/pages/home</div>
<div>rake refinery:override view=**/*menu</div>
<div>rake refinery:override view=_menu_branch</div>
<div>rake refinery:override javascript=admin</div>
<div>rake refinery:override javascript=refinery/site_bar</div>
<div>rake refinery:override stylesheet=home</div>
<div>rake refinery:override stylesheet=refinery/site_bar</div>
<div>rake refinery:override controller=pages</div>
<div>rake refinery:override model=page</div>
<div>rake refinery:override model=refinery/page</div>
<div>rake refinery:override presenter=refinery/page_presenter

Implementation of other refinerycms engines are also available

For example:

Add the gem to your applications Gemfile

  • gem ‘refinerycms-page-images’, ‘~> 2.0.0′
  • Execute bundle install
  • rails generate refinery:engine name

Example:

  • rails generate refinery:page_images
  • rake db:migrate