Is the Rails ecosystem a suitable replacement for drupal

Question

I want to make a community based site, which is Drupal's strength. However I also want to try other frameworks, especially Rails.

One of the best things about drupal is its huge modules library. If I were to switch to Rails, would I be able to find similar functionality freely available as plugins, or would I have to rebuild?

Does Rails have the equivalent of (as plugins or gems):

CCK/Fields?
Node Reference?
Views / Views Relationships?
PathAuto?
Threaded Commenting?
Multisite Functionality?
Apache Solr (or equivalent) Integration?

Thanks.

Answer 1

I'm afraid you'll probably hear this answer a lot, but it's not a suitable comparison.

Drupal is a ultimately a CMS, Rails is a framework. Apples to oranges, or perhaps even Apple Juice to oranges. Out of the box, you fire up Drupal and it does 'things': it has a database structure, the concept of nodes, interfaces blah, blah. If you fire up Rails you have an empty project.

As far as I know there isn't a "Drupal-on-Rails" project that would be a suitable equivalent. However, I can attest to the fact that there is an awful lot of Ruby/Rails community and O/S work out there and you might find something suitable. I'd also say that the level of modularity in Ruby and Rails tends to mean that the range of plugins/modules/gems one can use is much greater.

My personal $0.02. If Drupal does what you need, just use Drupal: it's mature and has a great community. It's never a good idea to try to port Project X over to a new language as a learning exercise because you'll inevitable fall into the "Well that's how it's done in language X!" trap and become disenchanted with the new system.

If you're wanting to learn Rails (which you should, it's awesome) I'd suggest you'd be best working on a small project and seeing what the ecosystem offers before deciding if it's suitable for the needs of your bigger projects.

Answer 2

I have to second what Govan said, but add to it.

With Drupal, unless you really want to get into building your own modules and extensions you are really interacting with an application. Even when you start using CCK, all you are really doing is flipping switches, filling in forms and defining new options for content on the site.

Ruby on Rails is two things, and neither of them bares much similarity to Drupal. You asked "How hard is it really?". To answer that you need to understand what both Ruby and Rails are. Ruby is a programming language designed to make the life of the object purist programmer simpler and more pleasant. So, the first part of how hard is it is simply to answer "how long do you feel it would take you to learn a completely new programming language, like PHP but different".

Rails is an 'opinionated' framework. It's opinionated in that it lays out how a Ruby web project should be structured, as well as providing multiple APIs for everything from database access to web presentation. To answer the "how hard is it" question for Rails then (assuming you know Ruby by this point), you have to answer how much do you need to learn about cacheing, database design, page design, RESTful programming etc etc.

It's not a short journey. you asked if there is an equivalent to CCK for Ruby and Rails which implies to me that at this point your knowledge of programming is somewhat limited. Ruby and Rails interact with the database. CCK lets you define things in a database. Thus, with Ruby and Rails you are effectively bypassing the wonderful dialogs and forms that CCK provides you with and doing the data definition bits yourself, by hand, in code.

From experience, when I've hired experts in another programming language and framework into my Rails teams, it has taken them between 1 and 3 months to get productive, and a further 3 to 6 months for their productivity to start to raise and approach that of the Rails experts on my team.

Thus, in your particular case, I would not recommend a switch away from Drupal to Ruby on Rails.