Create a Markdown Editor in Ruby on Rails | Hacker News Reader

Create a Markdown Editor in Ruby on Rails

blog.appsignal.com

43 pointsamalinovic6 comments

Nice - I learnt something from that!

I always wondered why rails didn't produce a competitor to WordPress. It just hasn't excelled in content management.

I have an open source real estate website builder called propertywebbuilder which I am working on reviving and even with the help of Claude code the content management part of it is proving to be the most painful.

There were a bunch. Radiant CMS, Refinery, Locomotive, and others.

Three problems (1) PHP is deployed all over cheap shared hosting providers (2) no one who uses a CMS cares about the backend (3) Wordpress has massive ecosystem

My personal theory on why rails never beat out Wordpress (beyond that it has different goals), is that any attempts to make a Wordpress competitor never addressed end-user plugins.

Ruby has package management called Gems. And while these are easy and powerful for a programmer to call on; they aren’t loaded using a visual interface and be able to be dynamically loaded by the end user as is the experience with Wordpress.

To make a real Wordpress competitor; a system of user-self-installable plugins needs to also be created. Now that’s harder than just making a CMS but it’s fuctionality that makes many so called Wordpress competitors non-starters.

One of the reasons is that it’s too easy to build your own CMS using Rails.

So normally I would say markdown does not need a special editor. It is ascii in its heart. I understand the wish to render the markdown as a rich text. I use obsidian and its editor also offers such a hybrid mode. After using it for 1 month I switched to the explicit text mode and only use the rich mode if I like to present something to other people. Perhaps such a way could also benefit your editor?

I just put easymde on the text area.

https://github.com/Ionaru/easy-markdown-editor

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