[Radiant] Our first site in Radiant, finally

[Loren Johnson]

Our first site in Radiant is up and running

Our first site in Radiant is up and running. We've got lots of work  
still to do, but we're happy with the manageability of things in  
Radiant even after a chaotic and compressed release schedule:

http://www.diopa.org

The CMS we used before this for this site was ModX (php) which had a  
few very good things going for it: 1) feature rich and, 2) dead  
simple to implement exactly the visual design we wanted, 3) mature.  
However where it lacked and what ultimately pushed us over to  
Radiant, despite it's relative lack of features: 1) More enjoyable /  
simpler to use, 2) Ruby, 3) Rails.  We hope to be building  
applications in Rails all next year and didn't want to be dragged  
down by a PHP legacy app.


Available Behaviors Utilized

Mailer Behavior, Search Behavior, RSS Feed Behavior, Redirect  
Behavior (just a code snippet grabbed from Sean here off the list)

MUCH GRATITUDE TO EVERYONE WHO SET OFFERED THESE BEHAVIORS TO THE  
OPEN. We couldn't have gotten the site done in Radiant without at  
least this much of a jump start.


Custom Behaviors / Global Tags Created

Custom global tags
In the course of getting what we needed out of Radiant for this  
release I hack-in the following custom tags They're all a little  
obscure and nothing genius going on so I won't bother explaining them  
-- if someone is interested in any more detail just ask:
<r:find_level level="">
<r:section_name>
<r:if_request_uri >
<r:navigation_level level=" ">

iCal fed Calendar Display
I also created a custom behavior called "calendar" including a set of  
tags and virtual pages for displaying a grouping of calendars fed  
from Google Calendar feeds. The Event and Calendar models are created  
and administered in another Rails app and database. If you go to:  
http://www.diopa.org/calendar/master/all you'll see it in action.

This behavior needs to be revisited and implemented using  
page_virtual and such (for now I override find_page_by_url and  
manually parse the path to get parameters...), but hopefully I'll get  
a chance to clean it up into something self contained and worth sharing.


Mods of anything outside the Vendor, Log and Public directories

Being the first attempt to seriously use Radiant much of my energy in  
this project was diverted to finding ways to stay out of the app  
directory. I want us to stay on track with Radiant as new releases  
are formulated.

The only change I had to make was in /app/views/page/new.rhtml where  
I added a row in the more...  and included the published_at date such  
that it could be modified to reflect the correct date on content  
converted from the previous site.


Wish List

1. A new plugin system / page types (same thing, right?). How much  
I'd love to be able to be free to build madly and freely on top of  
Radiant without feeling like I was branching or going to need to  
create an auxiliary Rails app.

2. Page reordering and re-parenting so that I can

3. A more sophisticated navigation generation tag or tags which has  
options for dynamically generating navigation based on the tree which  
would go hand and hand with arbitrary ordering of pages and probably  
a new page attribute or status to indicate whether an article should  
show-up in navigation or not.

Thanks to everyone for the bits of help throughout. I hope that  
through continuing to improve this site we'll have some help and code  
to offer back to the community.


Loren Johnson
FN Group
loren at fn-group.com
AIM: NL7XF

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