Just a mockup you say?

Recently, one of our customers wanted to have a mockup of an application. We thought at first to use Rails to make this mockup, but suddenly we realize that it was overkilling to create models and controllers when the requirements are not clear enough.

Once we decided not to use Rails to do this task, we did study some Ruby CMS around the Web. The different options we came around were:

• StaticMatic

  Pro

  It offers a lot of neat features like partials, layouts, host configurations and the most outstanding: custom view helpers.

  Con

  It just limited to Haml & Sass templates, so you will need to know this template system in order to use it.

• Nanoc

  Pro

  Is one of the biggest Ruby CMS around on the Web, it offers a lot of features like partials, layouts, templates, filters, tasks, etc.

  Con

  IMHO, is just to big for the average mockup site, if you will use this to make a mockup, you probably would like to stick with rails.

• Webgen

  Pro

  It offers the same options as many other CMS (partials, layouts, filters).

  Con

  The configuration is not as comfortable as in other CMS.

• Webby

  Pro

  It offers the same options as many other CMS (partials, layouts, filters), but also, it provides helpers for rendering LaTeX and Graphviz content, offers the chance to make custom rake tasks, offers CodeRay and Ultraviolet support for code highlighting on the mockup. The configuration is pretty easy, and it offers auto generation on file changes.

  Con

  It does not offer the custom view helpers feature and the docs are not as big as you would like.

As you may guess, I went to the option of Webby, it seems the more middle-size CMS made in Ruby that offers a lot of options and is easy to configure.

If you want to provide more observations on the comments section, is highly appreciated, I did not make a deep study on the others CMS, so maybe I'm missing some pros on each of them.