Rails content management system options:

Radiant CMS

  • Clean administrative UI
  • Active development (September 2009)
  • A volunteer group I was part of built americas.org with Radiant. Building HTML/CSS templates outside of Radiant first is highly recommended. We noticed varying levels of Radiant plugin quality/maintenance. Radiant seems to be flexible enough and has a usable UI, though it could be fairly heavyweight for a small project or team. It is under active development.

Adva CMS

  • Seems promising, documentation lacking (August 2009)
  • The Rails engines approach is interesting. UI is nice.

Browser CMS

  • Workflow features, would be overly complicated for our team.
  • Has the most impressive way of editing content visually.

Refinery Content Manager

  • Simple UI
  • Refinery code is within a Rails app as a plugin

RubyFlow

  • The source code behind RubyFlow and other sites by Peter Cooper, could be useful for a news site but probably not a general CMS.

More choices, didn’t try these out though:

Zena

  • Multilingual may be useful for you. Originally developed in Rails 1.2 timeframe.

Seed CMS

  • Good out of the box styling

Railfrog CMS

Comatose

If very minimal editing is necessary, Static may work. Made for easy deployment on Heroku, which does not offer local file storage (outside of /tmp), so configuration of an Amazon S3 account is necessary to store uploads. Simple code, zero UI, a starter app.

If editing on the web is not necessary at all, Marley may be an option.

Nesta is built on the Sinatra Ruby framework.

Finally, if your website isn’t going to change frequently, and technical people can change it, a static site generator could be a good option.

Staticmatic lets you build a site with Rails view concepts using Haml and Sass.

I hope this list is useful as a starting point for picking a Rails-based CMS.