Ease of implementation? Just grab any modern Rails and pick a frontend framework later.
Any tips on keeping the codebase legible?
If the developers put the projects together properly, it should have been very legible and easy to jump in on. Ruby isn't exactly a hard language to learn and generally very legible, almost to the point where each function/statement should be close to reading plain English (other than regexp and a few other things). That is, if the developers are following best practices, separation of roles, and not trying to hack together various work arounds because they don't know the language.