Ruby Based Blogging Engine

Question

What Rack enabled blogging engines exist? I want to deploy a free blog to heroku and need more customizabilty than the free hosting of Wordpress.com or Blogerty provide.

Also in another note, has anyone tried to port Wordpress to Ruby?

Answer 1

In any special order:

== Rack based

• toto
• ruby-slippers based on toto

== Jekyll based

• Jekyll itself
• Octopress blogging in jekyll
• spinto jekyll cms
• prose jekyll cms

== Rails based

• typo one of the oldest in active, with more features but more complex
• enki for hackers, basic code
• simplelog just main features
• mephisto not developed anymore
• radiant generic CMS

== Rails engines

• refinerycms generic CMS
• refinerycms-blog blog engine that integrates with refinerycms
• blogit
• ComfortableMexicanSofa generic CMS
• comfy-blog blog engine that integrates with ComfortableMexicanSofa
• Monologue: minimalistic blog engine with very few dependencies.
• squeaky
• hitchens
• kublog
• jabe
• locomotivecms generic cms
• BrowserCMS generic CMS

== Integrate jekyll with Rails

• bloggy

Answer 2

If you're a fan of git, you might try Jekyll. It is a static site generator which allows you to do some templating. You don't need a database which makes running it on Heroku even easier.

Answer 3

It's been awhile since I looked into this, but I believe the two major Ruby blog applications are still Mephisto and Typo. They've both been around awhile and appear to still be maintained.

As Heroku has a read-only file system, you may need to do some tweaking to get them to work. Here's a blog post on getting Typo running on Heroku.

You may also want to take a look at Radiant, which is more of a traditional CMS system, but can be used for blogging. There's actually a tutorial on the Heroku blog about getting it up and running on their platform.

Finally, if you want something a bit more lightweight but with full CSS control you may want to take a look at Scanty. It might require you go get your hands dirty, but seems to run great on Heroku. In fact, it's written by one of the founders.