Radiant CMS, Managing Web Sites on Rails

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.