Create a Markdown Editor in Ruby on Rails

Posted by amalinovic 6 days ago

Counter43Comment6OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by realty_geek 2 days ago

Nice - I learnt something from that!

I always wondered why rails didn't produce a competitor to WordPress. It just hasn't excelled in content management.

I have an open source real estate website builder called propertywebbuilder which I am working on reviving and even with the help of Claude code the content management part of it is proving to be the most painful.

Comment by fny 2 days ago

There were a bunch. Radiant CMS, Refinery, Locomotive, and others.

Three problems (1) PHP is deployed all over cheap shared hosting providers (2) no one who uses a CMS cares about the backend (3) Wordpress has massive ecosystem

Comment by evolve2k 2 days ago

My personal theory on why rails never beat out Wordpress (beyond that it has different goals), is that any attempts to make a Wordpress competitor never addressed end-user plugins.

Ruby has package management called Gems. And while these are easy and powerful for a programmer to call on; they aren’t loaded using a visual interface and be able to be dynamically loaded by the end user as is the experience with Wordpress.

To make a real Wordpress competitor; a system of user-self-installable plugins needs to also be created. Now that’s harder than just making a CMS but it’s fuctionality that makes many so called Wordpress competitors non-starters.

Comment by andrei_says_ 2 days ago

One of the reasons is that it’s too easy to build your own CMS using Rails.

Comment by Surac 2 days ago

So normally I would say markdown does not need a special editor. It is ascii in its heart. I understand the wish to render the markdown as a rich text. I use obsidian and its editor also offers such a hybrid mode. After using it for 1 month I switched to the explicit text mode and only use the rich mode if I like to present something to other people. Perhaps such a way could also benefit your editor?

Comment by loloquwowndueo 2 days ago

I just put easymde on the text area.

https://github.com/Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor