Scratch CMS was an idea that Jack Chan and Andy Pierce had after a couple drinks in a Mexican bar one night. It was such a cool and useful idea that they decided to make it happen. The resulting content management system is a foundation for which hackers with just a tiny, tiny bit of Ruby on Rails experience can quickly create personal websites.
After the initial setup that might be a little tedious, it's really easy to deploy and manage a website. Essentially, download the project, customize the home page, upload it to Heroku, and then create and manage your content without needing to look at code or bust out any text editors nor terminals/command prompts.
So, if you want to create your website from Scratch, here's what to do:
- Get your development environment set up (includes downloading the project)
- Edit the home page to style it the way you want
- Push it up to Github and then push it up to Heroku (this is where your website will exist)
- Go to the website's signup page (such as yoursitename.herokuapp.com/signup) and create your account.
- Now you can log in and manage your content (login at yoursitename.herokuapp.com/login)
For the instructions to set up the dev environment, click on LinuxSetup.md or MacSetup.md in the above Github project directory. If you're using Windows, you're on your own (create a virtual machine and install Linux on it).
Once you're done with the setup, click on Post-Setup.md for some tips on customizing your home page, pushing to Git, and deploying on Heroku.