With most CMS, everything has to be blog posts (or pages, or articles) and building anything else requires hacks and plug-ins.
Locomotive is different: it doesn't impose any specific data structure. Need a page for your band's discography?
Create a new "recording" content type with a title, year, album cover, and track listing.
Our custom content types are even enough flexible to build a contact form.
Features
We've got a couple very good reasons why you should learn yet another CMS
What's inside the engine ?
- Ruby on Rails 3 Powerful web framework
- Mongoid Ruby ODM framework for MongoDB
- Devise Flexible authentication solution with Warden
- Liquid Safe, customer facing template language
- HAML HTML Abstraction Markup Language
- Formtastic Form builder with semantically rich / accessible markup
- InheritedResources Makes controllers more powerful and cleaner
- Carrierwave Classier solution for file uploads
- Jammit-S3 Industrial Strength Asset Packaging
Fig. 1. — INSIDE THE ENGINE
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Custom content types
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Multi sites support
With a single instance of Locomotive, you can manage as many websites as your server can physically handle.
Deploying a website becomes just a matter of pointing your website domain to your Locomotive server. No webserver tweaking, no application rebooting at all. -
Template inheritance with Liquid
No need to learn one more weird syntax. We use Liquid, the most common templating language in Ruby. With Liquid, templates won't affect the security of your platform, and its syntax is simple to learn.
Of course, since we are always looking for ways to improve things, we also tweaked it a lot. For instance, we added the notion of template inheritance that we took from Python. And we wrote a large collection of useful helper tags covering a large number of needs: google analytics snippet, pagination snippet for collections, helper to reach an external webservice and display contents from it, etc. -
Great user experience
We believe that user experience should not be get the short end of the stick in an open source application. So we put a lot of time into the user interface and global experience, and we often tweak things until they're just right.
For instance, we recently added the CTRL+S shortcut to save a page in AJAX without refreshing. -
Inline front-end editing
When we discovered Aloha-Editor, a very powerful and promising browser editor named, it was instantly clear for us that we had to integrate it into Locomotive !
So Locomotive users can now define editable regions in their templates, and those regions can be edited by the end user directly from the page he's viewing. -
Ruby On Rails
We know that most people just want something that works, and don't care if it's written in Python, PHP, or Cobol. But in the case of Locomotive, we think its language is a huge asset.
We built Locomotive with Ruby on Rails 3, which gives developers the ability to build their own application on top of the Locomotive engine.
This means that Locomotive can be integrated in a wide range of applications Want to develop your own hosting websites platform? No problem! -
In The Cloud
Since we wanted people to be able to install Locomotive without setting up a server, we decided that Locomotive would run on Heroku, the famous ruby cloud platform. What's more, the database can also be hosted in the cloud (thanks to MongoHQ), and all the files uploaded from Locomotive are stored on Amazon S3.
With a such combination of powerful cloud services, we are able to host several websites for a couple of cents per month! But, of course, you are free to install on your server too !
