Refinery CMS now Supports Rails 3
The Rails 3 final gem has just come out yesterday and I would like to announce that Refinery CMS 0.9.8 officially supports it! This makes Refinery CMS the first popular Rails CMS to support Rails 3. Woohoo!
Rails 3 Support
Alex Coles (myabc) did a lot of the ground work to get Refinery up and running on Rails 3. His efforts were picked up on Refinery CMS Day where the community got together to see just how far we could get in 24 hours.
The transition to Rails 3 has been interesting. It has forced us to refactor the architecture of the Refinery core and sparked debates within the community about how Refinery should work which has ultimately made the project better.
I'm personally very proud of what the community has produced. A huge thank you to everyone who has contributed.
Goodbye Plugins, hello Engines
The transition to Rails 3 saw all of the plugins in Refinery rewritten to be engines instead. The main benefit we found with Rails engines is the ability to serve public files directly from the engine. This makes updating stylesheets, javascripts and images a breeze without the need for an "update task".
Optional Plugins gone from Core
Inquiries, Theming and i18n translations are now separate installable engines. This allows Refinery to be leaner but still provides the option of having these features if you need them.
Goodbye Attachment_fu, hello Dragonfly
Attachment_fu has been part of Refinery for a very long time, but since Refinery started a lot of new options have become available.
We've gone with Dragonfly which is fantastic. It supports Rails 3 out of the box and creates images on the fly and caches them. This means there won't be copies of images stored on disk that you don't actually use.
User experience improvements, optimisations & bug fixes
Reordering pages has been optimised to be smoother, slicker and give better user feedback.
More caching has been added to improve Refinery's performance.
And of course there has been a whole raft of bug fixes, see the change log for full details.
Ok, I want it! How do I get Refinery for myself?
Follow the how to install Refinery tutorial. And don't forget to watch Refinery CMS on GitHub.