* Added support for extensions--an extremely flexible way to extend
Radiant
* Merged Behaviors into the Page class; subclass page now instead
* Improved database support for Postgres and Sqlite
* Limited support for SQL Server
* Exceptions from tags now bubble up during testing
* Page parts are now sorted by ID so the order that you create them in
is preserved [Josh Ferguson]
* Implemented tag documentation DSL and UI [Sean Cribbs]
* Reworked the setup code
* Renamed script/setup_database to rake db:bootstrap
* Reworked the upgrade code to work around rake tasks
* Added rake tasks for freezing and unfreezing radiant to the edge
* r:children:each, r:children:first, and r:children:last now all accept
the same ordering and limit attributes and have the same defaults
* Snippets are now responsive to global context via the r:page tag. This
means that any tags inside r:page will refer to the page currently
being rendered, i.e. the page requested, not the local contextual page
via tags like r:children:each, etc. This is most relevant to recursive
snippets like the sitemapper example [Sean Cribbs]
* r:navigation now uses the pipe character ("|") to delimit URLs in the
urls attribute rather than the semi-colon
* :date now accepts a "for" attribute that specifies which attribute of
the page to render. Valid values of the attribute are published_at,
updated_at, created_at, and now.
* Created the r:cycle tag to make alternating tables and lists possible
* Added popups for filter and tag documentation inside the page editing
interface
* Added support for optimistic locking for all models [Daniel Shepherd]
* Added support to Radiant::Config for boolean values [Sean Cribbs]
* Caching no longer stores the headers and body in the same file [Daniel
Shepherd]
* Added support for the X-Sendfile header that works in conjunction with
caching to speed it up (by default X-Sendfile support is off) [Daniel
Shepherd]
* Moved the images and stylesheets into images/admin and
stylesheets/admin respectively to make it easier for Radiant's assets
to coexist easily with the site's assets
* Improved the Javascript that automatically updates the slug and
breadcrumb based off of the title so that it now response to all
change events
Managing the content of a web site is still a painful task, more that 10 years after the web took of. Web site management is an holy grail and Content Management Systems (CMS) have try to fill the gap without much success…
The problem is that mostly all Open Source CMS you can find are generally too complex. They want to achieve everything possible with an unique system. That leads to too many screens, too many options and too many plugins… Non expert people just can’t use those geeky systems and it’s very hard to train people on how to use the admin interface…
Here comes Radiant, an Open Source CMS made with Ruby on Rails. Radiant is more pragmatic and adopted a “less is more” philosophy. It focus on managing medium-size web sites with a page-centric approach that most people are used to.
The project is in early stages of development but already useable. It been able to power a web site I’m building in only 1 hour. I’ve put all my content into Radiant, pages, templates, styles and so on. Everything is in the system and I can manage it right from the administration interface. Neat!
The administration interface included with Radiant is simple enough for people to understand it… One of the real value of Radiant.
Concerning development, I needed a French localized interface for my web site and I’ve been able to submit a patch in no time. Since Radiant is written with Ruby on Rails, it’s quite extensible and you can use any plugin developed for Rails such as GLoc.
I think Radiant is an awesome CMS, the clean interface, helpful community, and benefits of Ruby on Rails make it shine in the world of bloated, clunky CMS systems.
Knowing Ruby and Rails makes it easy to extended and customize. This new Extentions concept is a step forward from the old Behaviors. Being able to essentially embedd your Ruby on Rails applications into the CMS is a dream. I really think this CMS is will continue to lead the pack in the Ruby based CMS solutions.
If you are a Ruby on Rails developer you should learn about Radiant.
(If you are a non-developer looking for a good CMS, befriend a Rails developer to get some help with the install.)
Simple as that, it’s a very good CMS. It manages to stay simple enough to be useful for most kinds of sites instead of packing so many bells and whistles that you get lost immediately (I’m looking at you, Textpattern).
Radiant has a good interface, and is extremely easy to navigate and use. I like that it has several text filters (including my favorite, Textile), and that is also makes it easy to assign pages layouts and behaviors.
The hierarchical pages are well done, and upon clicking on the Pages tab it is immediately clear how the website is organized.
Snippets make perfect sense, and are easy to use.
While it took me a bit to get used to Radius tags, it is the best solution I’ve seen to giving power to the user to sprinkle in bits of code without having to actually touch the underlying ruby code of the application.
I was also pleased to see that Radiant uses a lot of the caching power of Rails and caches content pages as static YAML files. This bodes well for Radiant’s ability to work as a CMS for heavily trafficked websites.
I have a few gripes as well about Radiant, but luckily many are being addressed.
There is no way yet to upload images and files, but the Radiant dev says that is it being addressed, so it should show up in a later release. Current you just have to manually put any resources like those in the public directory.
Also right now Stylesheets must exist as a mix of a layout and pages. I’d like to see Stylesheets given their own tab in the interface and the ability to assign stylesheets to layouts and pages the same way layouts are assigned to pages.
There is also very little documentation for Radiant, but this is such a new project that documentation will come with time. I plan to write an installation tutorial for Radiant to help with this disparity.
My one gripe with Radiant is really just a wart it gets from being a Rails app, and not anything inherently bad with Radiant inself. Deploying a Rails app of any kind still requires some experience with the framework and hosting services. You need to know how to set up Apache / Lighttpd, how to edit your database.yml correctly, and run any setup scripts to give your database any base data.
This is something that Rails core team knows about, and the deployment tutorials across the web are getting better and better. Shared hosts are also getting more comfortable with Rails as well, which is easing much of the pain. I’m confident many Rails deployment challenges will be solved within the coming year.
I still believe that content management systems are the best bridge we have right now to bring web developers, designers, and clients / users together. I also think WYSIWYG webdesign programs are responsible for a lot of problems that content management systems solve nicely (Frontpage still makes my eyes bleed).
