Ruby on Rails is going through some very dramatic changes.  A few months ago, it was announced that Merb and Rails would be merging to form Rails 3. This was absolutely fantastic news. The changes that are coming in Rails 3 will finally make the Rails internals the way they were supposed to be, organized.

Nameless CMS will heavily depend on these new Rails 3 features for it to become the product that we’d like it to be.  What that means is, we are waiting until the release of Rails 3 (or at beta version of it) before we can release a distributable version of Nameless CMS.

However, you will be able to preview the development of Nameless when we launch the new repository just for the CMS.  This is where we’ll start extracting the stuff inside of FIUSM.com into it’s own standalone CMS.

I’ll also be releasing architecture details in the coming weeks to give you a preview of what you can expect out of the project, and how you’ll be able to use the CMS from just using it as a plain news website to completely customizing it using the planned extensive API.

Stay tuned! A lot of exciting things are coming.

I’d like to welcome Rick Blanco and Camilo Payan to what is now the FIUSM.com development team.

Rick will be focusing on back-end work while Camilo will be focusing on the front-end and interface side.  They will be getting heavy into Ruby on Rails for the first time, but both are really excited to become hardcore Ruby hackers.

Here are a couple things that are in the pipeline for the summer:

• Ruby library for creating and working with Adobe InCopy files (.incx)
• Rails plugin for handling secret keys (like API keys) when working on an open source Rails project
• Overhaul of the Nameless admin panel with the workflow features finally merged in
• An alpha release of Nameless for people to play with

I’m going to try to keep screenshots of our work flowing through. Make sure to follow our Github to see some of the latest work that’s going on as it happens.

As of now, I am the only developer on the project so if you’re a Rails geek and would like to get involved, just send me a message on Github. Free points (and possibly pay!) if you go to FIU.

I plan to hopefully demo the public release version of the CMS at this year’s BarCamp Miami along with what we’d like to do with it. Along with the developer babble will be some talk about social media in the newspaper industry.

If you have any questions about the CMS or if you’re a Ruby on Rails developer that would like to get involved, please contact me. As soon as the CMS is cleared of some private information in the code, I will post it on our GitHub publicly. Even though it might not be useful to everyone just yet, you’ll be able to see the code we’re running and how it’s developed. Also, how it will evolve into a CMS that anyone can use.