Exploring the Radiant CMS

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).

The Good

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.

The Bad

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.

The Ugly

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.

Final Notes

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).