• live search library of all the contents
• fixed many CSS layout issues
• the nice Treba theme by Phu Ly (revised)
• a gem package for an easier installation

Installation:

requirements: Ruby 1.8.4 with gems. Only for windows: sqlite3 dll must be available in the path (for example in c:\ruby\bin )

if you are ok with the requirements you can download the packed gem and open a terminal (cmd for windows) in the same folder you have downloaded it, than type:

UPDATE: Now compages is directly available on RubyForge. So installation is even simpler,

just type:

gem install compages --include-dependencies

after finish, to install compages in a folder, type:
compages install your-folder-name

if you want to give it a try, type from within the folder:
mongrel_rails start

and browse to http://127.0.0.1:3000/admin

OK, that’s done! have fun, and give me your feedback, please!
You can track issues on http://code.google.com/p/compages/.

http://compages.freeonrails.org/admin
Thanks to Pratik of freeonrails for the hosting ;)

One of the major improvements reside in the “metaphor”. I mean that now all the thing looks and is very similar to a daily newspaper. Browsing the administrative pages of your site will look more lake leafing through your preferred daily. I that this will help many people thanks to this known behaviour: you can read articles that gives you informations on many things, those information could only “informative” (tips, helps, explanations of what’s going on on the page) or a little more “active” that is to say they contains links.
Using a metaphor brought a bunch of automatic choices already made (that is very good while designing a web-app), a simpler, lighter and more elegant layout, and a clearer direction for the project. All the contents now consists of a body with some meta-datas like title or author attached that will be used to render the contents within the online pages

Browsing in iTunes-like way of the contents is very cool, I think that many people already know how to act in this kind of environment, and the remaining will easily learn with the right hint on the screen. The browsing is based on the metadatas attached to every content, so you’ll able to browse by author, by page (in which the content is present) and by categories associated with every content (yes, the fashionable tags). Obviously If you don’t select any criteria you’ll browse simply by title or by the first words of the content.

I’ve mentioned metadatas, this is very powerful. The more the content is structured with metadatas (i.e. to increase its meaningfulness) the more you’ll be versatile and future-ready. Examples? the iTunes-like search can be very narrow this way and if one day I’ll find that the actual criteria are not so meaningful, I’ll change them in seconds, that’s agility! RSS of your site can be implemented automatically. And also “Dublin Core”: if you know what it is you already know also what I’m thinking to, otherwise will be enough to know that if you add DC information to your site you’ll be ready for the future web-searches (think of a google search by author).

That’s all.

Soon I’ll add some screenshots and the address of the new SVN repository.

I have a couple of credits for this (tiny?) work:

• Firefox’s “Firebug” extension
• IE’s “Developer Toolbar”

Though the latter is not comparable with Firebug, the DevToolbar has its own worth.

I put some example data to sql-import in the db dir.

Any kind of feedback is welcome!!!

UPDATE nov-9-06 : now it’s much more simple: there’s an online demo! check it out!!!

• A pleasant user interface
• Drag-n-drop contents around the page
• Change the content appearance with a click
• Nearly NO user management/rights system
• WYSIWYG content writing
• Built using Ruby on Rails (which means that adapting Compges is as easy as any other Rails application)
• Basic templating system (building a template means inserting a string like %%NameOfMyArea%% where you want to drop contents)