Dan Pickett from Enlight Solutions gives an overview of the Rails 3 CMS: REfinery

1. Refinery
CMS

2. Hi!
www.enlightsolutions.com
on the InterTubes
Hiring
dpickett
on Twitter

3. • Built primarily by the folks at Resolve
Digital (A New Zealand Agency)
• In Active Development
• Runs with Rails 3 goodness
• Solid, modular architecture

4. Development Status
•1,563 watchers, 440 forks
• 150 Contributors
• Recently went 1.0!
• Rails 3 compatible

5. Problems Well Suited
For Refinery
• Stakeholder want to edit content on their
site
• You have an existing app that requires a
subset of CMS features
• You have an an app where you’re constantly
changing copy, and it’s disrupting
development
• You need a CMS architected for
internationalization

6. Core Features
• Files
• Pages
• Images
• Template/Layout
• Page Parts

7. Opinions
• Devise for authentication
• FriendlyID for permalinks
• Dragonfly for Image Processing
• will_paginate for pagination
• Favors ERB over liquid or other templating
languages

8. Engine Architecture
• All components
are engine gems
• Pick and choose
what you want
• Build your own

9. Popular Engines
• Blog
• Portfolio
• News
• Inquiries (Contact)

10. Installation
• Download the gem
• A Few Extra Hurdles to get it working on
Heroku
#> gem install refinerycms
#> refinerycms <cms_project_name>
#> rails s

11. Page Functions
•Nesting pages
• Editable meta tags and title
tags
•Redirection
• Including in a nav bar

12. Administrative UI

13. Administrative UI
• Tabular
• Uses WhyMeEditor (and JQuery)
• Behind Devise Authentication

14. Dashboard

15. Solid Documentation

16. Solid Documentation
• Uses the Rails Guides format
• Can be found at http://refinerycms.com/guides
• Topics Include: Installation, Mounting in an
existing app, Customizing Designs

17. Extensibility
• Engine driven
• Includes an Engine generator
• Settings Abstraction
• Ability to add functionality to
the administrative UI
(somewhat limiting)

18. Takeaways
• Easy to install
• Easy to extend
• Strong opinions
• Under active development
• Requires some maintenance

19. Biggest Win
The ability to mount
Refinery in an existing
app

20. Thanks!
• I’ll post slides @ www.enlightsolutions.com
• Chat me up on Twitter: @dpickett
• Chat me up on IRC: dpickett in #boston.rb
• We’re hiring!