My colleague Christopher Haupt and I have been working for two years
on a Rails-based hosted content management system, and it’s recently
emerged from Beta. We’d love to hear your feedback: you can sign up
for a free account at www.webvanta.com, or watch the intro video at
Video: How Webvanta Delivers Superior, Turnkey Websites and Apps
(We’re the guys who created the Learning Rails online course that you
may be familiar with.)
Webvanta uses Rails under the hood (and borrows some stuff from
Radiant), but it is designed for folks who want to be able to build
dynamic web sites with custom data structures without any back-end
programming. We’re trying to deliver (part of) the value of Rails to
web designers who don’t have the time or interest to build Rails apps,
and for projects where the budget doesn’t support it.
This project arose from custom work we were doing, and the observation
that so many of the needs were common across projects. It’s taken on a
life of its own and is now our full-time business venture.
For now, this is a hosted service only, but we’re exploring the
possibility of publishing an open-source version.
Thanks for any feedback you can offer.