Thanks to the guys that build BrowserCMS, our lives has just gotten easier!
No longer we have to stick with Radiant, BrowserCMS is, we think, easier and more robust.

This post is a simple getting started guide, that will help you to:

1. Install the BrowserCMS
2. Create a new page
3. Add text content to the newly created page
4. Publish your page

Installation

Packaged as a gem, you can include BrowserCMS in any Rails (2.3 or later) project. Public assets, style sheets, images and JavaScript scripts is included in gem. In the installation process these assets will be copied to your project.

Let’s start install it by doing

$ sudo gem install browsercms

By the time I wrote this post, the latest version was 3.0.6. Now create a project using a specific BrowserCMS template (a Rails template is simply a Ruby script with some domain-specific extensions to facilitate application configuration.)

$ rails my_new_project_name -d mysql -m http://www.browsercms.org/templates/blank.rb

Unless you are not using password for your ‘root’ account to connect to the database, you will see this error message

Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)

you can reapply the template again at anytime after you change the database configuration in config/database.yml by running

$ rake rails:template LOCATION=http://www.browsercms.org/templates/blank.rb

from your project directory. Now run the server

$ script/server

and open your browser to http://localhost:3000/ and to log into the admin for the CMS go to http://localhost:3000/cms. In development mode the default username/password is cmsadmin/cmsadmin. You should now be logged in.

Create a new page

On the home page, you will see a menu labeled ‘Home’, you want to create new page ‘About Us’ with a menu link positioned below ‘Home’. Now log in into the CMS admin panel and do the following:

1. Click on ‘SITEMAP’. The Sitemap page shows you a tree structure with all the sections and pages in your site, but you can add/edit pages/sections, and also can reorganize your pages/sections using drag and drop.
2. Click on ‘My Site’
3. Click on ‘Add Page’
4. On the displayed form, there are several fields to fill out. Name and template are the important ones
5. Click ‘SAVE’ to create a new page

You will be taken to the newly created page, which will be blank.

Adding new text content to a page

What you want to do now is to add some text content the your ‘About Us’ page.

1. Turn on the Visual Editor
2. Click on the ‘Add Content’ icon below your page
3. Click on ‘Text’ on the ‘Select Content Type’ page
4. Fill out the ‘Name’ and ‘Content’ fields. You can enter ‘Tags’ to your content as well
5. Click ‘SAVE’

Publish your page

Your page is not published yet, to make it publicy available to the world click ‘PUBLISH’. To test your newly created page, simply log out from the admin panel and go to http://localhost:3000/about-us, you will see your text content you just added.

Hopefully this post will help you to getting started with BrowserCMS. Besides the concept that you need to understand, there are still many hidden power of BrowserCMS to be found and you can start from its Reference Documentation.

If you need help in developing a CMS solution in Ruby on Rails, please dont hesitate to contact us at info[at]kiranatama[dot]com!