Thomas von Deyen's Profile

Yes, you are right. Great work on Refinery btw.

I wanted to show people some alternatives.

And to be very clear: I do not want to start a "A is better than B" discussion. I think it's great to have choice. Refinery is great in what it does, so it's Alchemy.

Yes, you are right. You always can use any kind of technique to achieve the same goal.
You could do this even with wordpress, for sure.

But does your customer has a technical background? Does he know what a 'p' is and what this means? Ours have not, and they should not, IMHO. How do you prevent failures in markup? Especially in SEO concerns? Alchemy decouples the markup 100% from styling and content. So a heading is always a H1 tag (or what ever the webdev wants it to be). The user does not even has the chance to change that and is save from making errors. And they love Alchemy for that!

How do you ensure this with refinery? Do you wrote tinymce plugins, not really? And how do you manage repeatable, global content, like teaser boxes, footer parts, etc. And what does this mean for your developers? It is easy and intuitive to implement?

I think it is always a question of perspective.

You really should give Alchemy a try for your next project.

I am sure you will love it :)

Regards

Right, Robin.

If anyone is interested in an extremely flexible rails cms, that completely separates content, markup and styling, then you really should try Alchemy CMS.

Do you really want to give your customers a TinyMCE editor, where he has to put images into markup? I doubt that! Refinery and all other "Page model, body column" cms are great if you need a small little cms addon for your own rails app and you, as a developer, manages the content for your customer.

But if you want to let your customer manage a whole webpage with several different page layouts and page elements you won't make him happy with such a cms.

Please try Alchemy :)