Summary
In this case, it's why I want a Ruby version of Drupal. There are some good reasons that apply in the general case...

Josh Huckabee created a really great piece of flypaper with his blog on Drupal and Ruby on Rails. I landed there, and just had to comment. In it, he wondered why someone would be searching on a combination of those two terms. This was my response...

I, too, searched on "Ruby and Drupal", and landed on your page. I'm guessing that my goal is the same as that of many other searchers--finding a CMS with many of Drupal's terrific features, but implemented in Ruby.

These are my reasons for looking for a Ruby-based implementation. They can probably be applied by just about anyone with a language preference to just about any project:

• Capability: Ruby is powerful, and applications written in it can be extended in interesting ways, including adding to existing classes without rewriting them, and construction of useful domain-languages to solve domain-specific problems.

• Familiarity: It takes a lot of time to learn a language and become seriously proficient at it. Ruby is pretty unique in that it can be used for day-to-day scripting and for serious applications. That makes it reasonable to think of it as possibly the "one language to bind them all", so you can spend your time getting seriously proficient in one language, rather than acquiring a surface familiarity with many. (Each has its own rewards, but real mastery lets you do so much more.)

• Confidence: Any extensions you want to make will most likely require extensive refactoring. Otherwise, they probably would already be implemented. Given the near-inevitability of wanting to do something along those lines eventually, it makes sense to look for an implementation that is written in a language you are familiar with, which you know to be powerful enough to do anything you might ever want to do, so can undertake the task with confidence.

Hopefully, that helps to explain why folks keep finding your page after a search. BTW: I'm grateful for the pointers to Mephisto and Radiant CMS. Apparently, they are somewhat equivalent to Drupal, so they're worth a strong look. (In return, I felt I owed you a semi-choherent explanation!)
:_)

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About the Blogger

Eric Armstrong has been programming and writing professionally since before there were personal computers. His production experience includes artificial intelligence (AI) programs, system libraries, real-time programs, and business applications in a variety of languages. He works as a writer and software consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote The JBuilder2 Bible and authored the Java/XML programming tutorial available at http://java.sun.com. Eric is also involved in efforts to design knowledge-based collaboration systems.