Drupal vs. Ruby on Rails first impressions.
Posted: erik-hedin 26 October 2008
I have been playing around with Ruby on Rails for the past week.
Everything is so different than Drupal which I have been working with over the past year. It seems like I spend so much time hacking away at Drupal to properly display my output in a themable manner. Drupal 6 is better but still a bit grey as far as documentation is concerned.
Here is how I would some up the two:
Drupal = a over grown Bonsai Bush that you have to hack down to size.
Ruby on Rails = a sparse tree that you only grow the leaves you need.
Ruby generates all of the templates you need. When you want to modify your output markup you just go in and change what rails generated. It seems much easier. This is far better suited to designing high end sites where you want to build the whole front end from the ground up.
Drupal would obviously be the better choice to just quickly get a site out. Use what's there and just theme what you have to. Good to know now. Hindsight is 20/20 and I would have probably made some different choices knowing what I do now.
Update 5-21-2009
I am completing my 5th Drupal 6 website. Now that I have more of theming down for Drupal 6 life is a lot better. Coming back to rails has become pretty hard. I can set up a site like http://www.shadowscreenproductions.com/ pretty quickly. Using a few ajax jQuery techniques makes the site handle more like Ruby on Rails site. The cool thing about Drupal is that it can be deployed on most shared hosts where your customer may already be hosting. Moving to a ROR site would require a new platform and moving things like email and domains which as a developer can be an un-wanted headache.
Where does Ruby on Rails Shine? I think the key here is if you need to build a very custom site from the ground up rails is perfect. Your clients will need to have a mem-cached environment and probably run a dedicated server. A drupal 6 site has template and data caching right out of the box eliminating the need to run mem-cache for smaller traffic sites.
Verdict:
small/medium (large ok also) sites = Drupal
medium/large very custom sites = Ruby on Rails
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Useful information. I advise you to use Drupal. Drupal - a very useful and convenient system. Drupal - content management system written in PHP and uses a data warehouse relational database (supported by MySQL, PostgreSQL, and others). Drupal is free software, protected license GPL, and developed by enthusiasts from all over the world. This useful information.