A Ruby blog engine like no other

Meet the Ruby blog engine that integrates with your website using a straightforward API. Smooth, simple, and tasty content integration — that’s Butter.

Posted on November 28, 2023

Intuitive admin interface

So easy to use. So easy to customize. You’re going to love the blog you build with ButterCMS.

Handy integration with Ruby

Our Ruby blog engine has a simple content API and drop-in Ruby SDK that makes the magic happen in minutes, not hours.

A truly zero-maintenance solution

With ButterCMS, you’ll never worry about security upgrades, hosting, or performance again.

You've got better things to do than build another blog

Drop our Ruby blog engine into your app, and get back to more interesting problems.

ButterCMS is an API-based blog engine that integrates seamlessly with new and existing Ruby apps. It's great for SEO, and provides a clean and modern user interface that your marketing team will love. You can deploy ButterCMS in minutes using our Ruby API client. 

That leaves plenty of time for you and your marketing team to do what you do best: create killer apps with killer content. 

Play video

See how Butter’s API enables you to launch a flexible blog with amazing SEO using your existing tech stack.

G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award G2 crowd review award

Best blog engine on the market

headshot of Hampton Catl

After shopping the market, it was clear that ButterCMS was the perfect choice. It allows our developers to build powerful components and makes it easy for our marketing team to drive a better customer experience. Hampton Catlin Creator of Sass and Haml

Deploy our Ruby Starter in 30 seconds

Or follow the below commands to clone a copy of the repo from github, install dependencies, set your free Butter token, and run your local server on localhost:3000/.

# requires ruby 3.1.0
$ git clone https://github.com/ButterCMS/rails-starter-buttercms.git
$ cd rails-starter-buttercms
$ bundle install
$ echo 'RAILS_BUTTER_CMS_API_KEY=' >> .env
$ bundle exec rails s

Built to make content marketing easy

ButterCMS is the best Ruby blog engine for a simple reason: Ruby developers can build solutions that marketing people love. Our API allows your content gurus to quickly spin up high-converting blog templates, sidebars, related content features, and more, all using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

  • Use main domain (improves SEO)
  • Friendly admin interface
  • Upload images, video, and other media
  • Edit URL slugs and meta tags
  • Tags and categories
  • Author profiles
  • RSS/Atom feeds
  • Search
  • Webhooks
  • And more...

The simplest Ruby blog engine you'll find

Our simple setup saves you time and money. Take us for a spin to see for yourself!

headshot of LUKE GARDNER

It's the epitome of plug-and-play simplicity for content creators. It does exactly what I need it to. LUKE GARDNER, CONTENT SPECIALIST, PRINTAVO

Fast integration with any Ruby app

Our mission was to make it easy to integrate Butter with your existing Ruby app in minutes. It’s so simple! To demonstrate, here’s a mini tutorial to give you a feel for the process of adding Butter to your Ruby app.

Of course, you can also use our Pages and Collections to do advanced content modeling. For a full integration guide, check out our Official Guide for the ButterCMS Ruby API client.

Play video

See how easily you can integrate the ButterCMS Pages API with your Ruby app.

Seamless Ruby components

Empower your marketing team to create a customized blog engine that aligns perfectly with your Ruby components. 

Components are the essential building blocks of any Ruby app, and ButterCMS handles them with ease. 

Our drag and drop interface makes it simple to structure your content to match existing Ruby components and to create new reusable components whenever you need them.

The best Ruby blog engine for SEO

ButterCMS gives you absolute control over on-page SEO ranking factors. Key SEO variables are built into our default post template, giving your marketing team direct access to configure all of these settings, and more.

  • Page title
  • Post tags and categories
  • META description
  • URL slug
  • Featured image / Open Graph image
  • Image ALT tags
  • Link anchor text

How to integrate ButterCMS into your Ruby application

Integrating the Butter blog engine into your Ruby app is dead simple. Here's a mini tutorial to get a feel for setting up your blog home and blog post pages. 

For a full integration guide, check out our Official Ruby Guide

To display posts we create a simple /blog route in our app and fetch blog posts from the Butter API. See our API reference for additional options such as filtering by category or author. The response also includes some metadata we'll use for pagination.

require 'rubygems'
require 'bundler'
require 'buttercms-ruby'

ButterCMS::api_token = 'your_token'

class App < Sinatra::Base
  get '/blog' do
    params[:page] ||= 1

    @posts = ButterCMS::Post.all(:page => params[:page], :page_size => 10)
    @next_page = @posts.meta.next_page
    @prev_page = @posts.meta.previous_page

    erb :index
  end
end

Next we'll create a simple view named blog.html.erb that displays our posts and pagination links:

<h2>Posts</h2>

<!-- List of posts -->
<% @posts.each do |post| %>
  <a href="<%= url("/blog/#{post.slug}") %>"><%= post.title %></a>
  <br>
<% end %>

<!-- Pagination links -->
<div>
  <% if @previous_page %>
  <a href="<%= url("/blog?page=#{@prev_page}") %>">Prev</a>
  <% end %>

  <% if @next_page %>
  <a href="<%= url("/blog?page=#{@next_page}") %>">Next</a>
  <% end %>
</div>

We'll also create an additional route for displaying individual posts:

class App < Sinatra::Base

  ...

  get '/blog/:slug' do
    @post = ButterCMS::Post.find(params[:slug])

    erb :post
  end
end

The view for displaying a full post includes information such as author, publish date, and categories. See a full list of available post properties in our API reference. We use the content_for Sinatra helper for setting the HTML title and meta description in the <head> tag of the page.

<% content_for(:title) { @post.seo_title } %>
<% content_for(:meta_description) { @post.meta_description } %>

<!-- Post title -->
<h2><%= @post.title %></h2>

<!-- Post author -->
<a href="<%= url("/author/#{@post.author.slug}") %>"><%= "#{@post.author.first_name} #{@post.author.last_name}" %></a>

<!-- Post categories -->
<% @post.categories.each do |category| %>
  <a href="<%= url("/category/#{category.slug}") %>"><%= category.name %></a>
<% end %>

<!-- Publish date -->
<%= @post.published %>

<!-- Post body -->
<%= @post.body %>

That's it! The blog posts created in your Butter dashboard will immediately show up in your app.

Get Started for Free

ButterCMS saves you development time

Most customers get our Ruby blog engine up and running in less than an hour. Try it yourself!

headshot of DILLON BURNS

Simple as can be, with powerful features and great customer support. DILLON BURNS, FRONT END DEVELOPER, KEYME

Try Butter free for 14 days

See for yourself what makes Butter the best Ruby blog engine out there. Click the button below to sign up for your free 14-day trial.