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by realty_geek 187 days ago
Nice - I learnt something from that!

I always wondered why rails didn't produce a competitor to WordPress. It just hasn't excelled in content management.

I have an open source real estate website builder called propertywebbuilder which I am working on reviving and even with the help of Claude code the content management part of it is proving to be the most painful.
2 comments
fny 187 days ago
There were a bunch. Radiant CMS, Refinery, Locomotive, and others.

Three problems (1) PHP is deployed all over cheap shared hosting providers (2) no one who uses a CMS cares about the backend (3) Wordpress has massive ecosystem

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evolve2k 187 days ago
My personal theory on why rails never beat out Wordpress (beyond that it has different goals), is that any attempts to make a Wordpress competitor never addressed end-user plugins.

Ruby has package management called Gems. And while these are easy and powerful for a programmer to call on; they aren’t loaded using a visual interface and be able to be dynamically loaded by the end user as is the experience with Wordpress.

To make a real Wordpress competitor; a system of user-self-installable plugins needs to also be created. Now that’s harder than just making a CMS but it’s fuctionality that makes many so called Wordpress competitors non-starters.

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andrei_says_ 187 days ago
One of the reasons is that it’s too easy to build your own CMS using Rails.
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