Radiant Overview

Simple Admin Interface

Built from the ground up to be as simple as possible, Radiant features an elegant administrative interface that centers around three key components: pages, snippets, and layouts.

Pages

Pages contain the meat of the content for a Web site and may use Markdown, Textile, or plain HTML. Pages are composed of multiple parts such as a body and sidebar.

Snippets

Content that is used in multiple places can be stored in a snippet. Snippets are very similar to PHP includes or Rails partials.

Layouts

Layouts generally contain most of the HTML for a page’s design. Layouts can render pages parts in any way they choose. One layout could choose to render the body and sidebar of a page, while another layout (a print layout) could render only the body.

Flexible Site Structure

Unlike many other blogging engines Radiant allows you to arrange pages according to any hierarchy. A Weblog in Radiant can be as simple as a collection of child pages underneath a parent page.

Radius Template Language

Radiant has a special macro language (similar to HTML) called Radius which makes it easy to include content from other pages, iterate over page children, and display content conditionally. Radius tags are available in pages, snippets, and layouts.

Custom Text Filters

Radiant ships with support for Markdown and Textile, but developers can easily create text filters for any markup language such as RDoc, BBCode, or Structured Text.

Intelligent Page Caching

Radiant includes an intelligent caching mechanism which allows content to be cached for a maximum of 5 minutes. This ensures that content is always fresh and provides an optimal level of performance.

Built with Ruby on Rails

Radiant is built using Ruby on Rails. This means it’s easy for developers to extend Radiant because it’s built on a widely accepted (and understood) Web application development platform.

Licensed Under the MIT License

Radiant is licensed under the MIT License. This means that Radiant is free for commercial and non-profit use. It also means that you are free to modify and distribute Radiant as long as you don’t remove the appropriate notices from the source code.

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