Core Team

Philip Arndt, New Zealand

Phil is the lead developer of the Refinery project. You'll often find him helping out on IRC or the Google Group while contributing to the project on a near daily basis in his own time.  

Phil's passion for open source software and the Ruby community has led to his contribution to many other important projects, many of which are dependencies of Refinery.

Follow on GitHub, Twitter, or visit his website.

Uģis Ozols, Latvia

Uģis set a goal to be part of the core team in 2011 and with his hard work, here he is! Uģis is a talented Ruby developer who will help shape the future of Refinery and has so far made the second largest contribution to the project.

Follow on GitHub, Twitter, or visit his website.

Rob Yurkowski, Canada

Like Uģis, Rob set a goal to be part of the core team within a year. Unlike Uģis, Rob's approach was to stick his nose into the middle of things and pretend he'd been part of the Core Team all along. 

Rob's a clever developer who has been programming since he first got bored in his high school math class and decided to make games on his TI-86. He now manages our community, keeps our mailing list flowing, and deals with a lot of support issues inside of IRC.

Follow on Github, Twitter, or visit his website.

Key Principles

• "The Rails Way" - where possible Refinery embraces conventions used in Rails, allowing any Rails programmer to leverage existing knowledge to get up and running quickly.
• End user focused interface - Refinery's user interface is simple, bright and attractive so end users feel invited and not overwhelmed.
• Awesome developer tools - Refinery makes it easy for developers to add functionality and change the front end look and feel.
• Encourage and Help Others - Refinery has an active community on Google Groups and IRC. If you ever have a question there is usually someone able and willing to assist you.

Core Team Alumni

Former members of the core team who can no longer be active in the day-to-day operations of Refinery.

David Jones, USA

Refinery CMS was originally founded by David in 2004 at Resolve Digital.

With limited Rails CMS options at the time, he built CMS capabilities for each project he was working on and eventually assembled the common features into a single project that would become Refinery CMS.  

Other CMS user interfaces were developer focused, but he wanted something that could be used by anyone. 

Refinery CMS would go on to become simple, clean and understandable to non-tech savvy people who are ultimately the people who update the content on their site.

Since then, Resolve Digital has deployed over 100 websites using Refinery.

Follow on GitHub, Twitter, or visit his website.

Steven Heidel, Canada

Steven is a notable Rails developer who has made regular significant contributions to the Refinery project and helped to drive our vision and online presence forward.

Steven now spends his time studying toward his impressive future qualifications and as the Vice President of Operations and Finance at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Follow on GitHub, Twitter, or visit his website.

Project Milestones