Showcase

Something I've debated is whether to use an all-in-one CMS and customize it to do everything or to find (or write) a CMS that was created specifically for the task at hand. Showcase, written by Kyle Maxwell in Ruby on Rails, is one of the latter--it does an excellent job at what it was intended to be, a CMS to manage a portfolio.

Click here to view a screenshot of the Showcase admin interface

The Showcase admin allows you to manage several things, the name, subtitle, stylesheet, JavaScript behavior of your websites, as well as the users, pages and projects (both of of these sections can be renamed) and files attached to the site. Within a specific project, you can edit the name, description, version, thumbnails and attachments associated with the project. The admin interface makes use of Ajax in all the right places--editing and adding to the site is simple and fun.

Once you've got your data in there, Showcase produces an entirely unstyled site--it's up to you to create the CSS and there's no default template. While I think a default template or style would be nice, it's really not a bad idea not to have one--this guarantees that every Showcase site will look different.

Installation is very straightforward if you have Rails set up on your server. Basically you check it out of svn, create a database, tell showcase what it's called, type rake migrate and you're done. One caveat is that at the time of this writing Showcase requires Rails 1.0 (not 1.1) so make sure you freeze Rails 1.0 in vendor/rails.

If you're looking for a good, free CMS to manage your portfolio and don't mind writing a little CSS, check out Showcase.