Our Q&A site is built in Ruby/Rails, but the blog is very bare-bones and not that great. Rather than have our dev build an in-house custom blogging platform, we’ve thought about the possibility of just creating an external Tumblr blog, and having the Blog menu button point there. The thinking is that Tumblr’s already a decent blogging platform with most of the bells and whistles that we want, so no point in having our dev recreate the wheel.
But that seems suboptimal in that it would take users away from our site. Is it possible to integrate the Tumblr platform natively on our site? Say, at blog.jobstr.com or the like? Should it be straightforward to have tumblr play nicely within our custom RoR web app such that we’d have access to the full spectrum of Tumblr functionality, but have the blog reside natively on our site?
I’m not sure how much you can customize a tumblr site but I would have thought it would be easiest to keep the two sites separate, if you can make them look the same then the user experience won’t be jarring when you move between them.
Integrating the two into one rails app would mean scraping the data from the tumblr api and building a lot of the functionality yourself, you could do this if the payoff of one site is worth the effort.
I don’t know of gems that would help you do this but you can look at your options here https://www.ruby-toolbox.com/search?utf8=✓&q=tumblr