Let's avoid reinventing the wheel...

After reading the other day that famous article, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, I started to have things running inside my mind... that is... thoughts mumbling and mumbling inside... Also I am working with few opensource projects related to cms publishing and editing, and I am a bit fed up of practices like the ones I commented on this article.

Also as I have commented several times, I want to get started on ruby on rails. I have some personal projects in mind that I think would benefit of having a good cms. If it is written with ruby on rails framework, it can be even better - a good moment to get started on it.

So the question is: do you guys know a good cms with ruby on rails?

I mean, a cms. Not a blogging software - it is different.

If there's not such a thing (I haven't found anything while searching for that on google and cms forums), I am interested in build one which would have features like these ones:

  • Clean separation of content and behaviour (should use templates)
  • The templates should be very similar to smarty style templates
  • Should generate clean (x)html
  • A visual online editor would be nice. Enough <tags> when coding ;)
  • Should not depend on any database (like using Adodb with php)
  • Easy to add features (the so called modules)
  • Object oriented programmed. Unable to define things in the global namespace, that is - complicated to break other modules code (although i think this can be immediate achieved if using ruby on rails)
  • Quick and efficient. I don't mean hacker code which is impossible to understand, though. Meaningful. Logical.
  • Something like the postnuke's permission system would be nice. It would be nicer if it was simpler and easier to understand.
  • Multilanguage support
  • Easy to maintain: install, uninstall, update
  • Connectivity with other systems: this is basicly things like rss, pings, ajax, etc... (i wanted to add a bit of buzzwords to this...). That would allow to play with the information of the cms with different interfaces, as for example flash.
  • A non programmer should be able to manage things in the system given a publisher account, without reading any manual. This stands for not using jargon or unintuitive interfaces.
  • And last but not least: I would like it to be documented in proper english, properly indexed. I want to understand the documentation, not to look for documentation to the documentation. And the documentation is not running an script and generating documents from the source code.
Any suggestion?

Any volunteer for this (if there's not such cms in the market)? Please do not say: I would help but I don't know how to code/design. Then just say: I would love to test it and provide you with the most delightful set of test reports ever seen. That is helpful.