Suppose you’ve built a Rails app for a client. A couple of months after launching their MVP, your client wants to ramp up their marketing and they ask you to add a blog to their website. “It’d be great if it were WordPress”, they tell you. “Oh, and our SEO consultant tells us it should live on our primary domain versus a subdomain.”
The thought of WordPress sends shivers down your spine, but you start quietly doing some research on your options.
Integrating WordPress into your Rails app is impossible, but if you run WordPress (or a similar blogging solution like Ghost) separately it’d require hosting and have to live on a separate subdomain, which will cause great disappointment to your SEO-enthused client.
You explore the workaround of setting up a reverse proxy, but it looks extremely unpleasant. And even after all that trouble, you’ll still need to figure out how to customize templates to get the design to match your beautiful Rails website–you wonder if they could share the same layout and CSS…
Determined to find something that can integrate into your Rails app, you scour Github for open-source blog engines. You hop from one promising repository to the next. The first project you find looks good but hasn’t been updated in three years. Another requires adding a bunch of bloated database tables to your already over-burdened database. Your hope begins to fade…
If this situation sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone.
We’ve run into this issue numerous times where a client wants to add a blog to a project we’ve already created.
We’ve wanted a blog system that:
- Supports image uploads, tags, etc
- Has a WYSIWYG editor
- Uses the existing design and layouts
- Clean and readable code
- No more than a day of work to setup
We recently came across ButterCMS, an API-based Rails blog engine and Rails CMS that comes with a gem. Butter took only a couple of hours to setup and provided a friendly UI for our clients. Since its a hosted service, there’s no maintenance and the product keeps improving which our clients love.
Here’s a one-minute screencast I created to demonstrate how easily Butter can be integrated into an existing Rails app:
Build a Rails blog with ButterCMS
Wrap Up
The next time your client asks for a blog, avoid Wordpress altogether by using a Rails blog engine like ButterCMS. Try out ButterCMS for free by signing in with Github.