[Radiant] Mental Branch "Extensions" Notes

[Loren Johnson]

I've been playing with the Mental branch this weekend to test-out the  
work being done on the new Radiant Extensions concept. I thought I  
just put down a quick narrative of my experience with it to give  
those who've not had a chance to check it out recently a preview of  
what's to come. There is some work still to do here, but as far as I  
can see a lot of work has been done in the last few weeks.


Everything is working pretty well... I can generate and extension  
"script/generate extension calendar" and modify the necessary lines  
in the extension activate method to make it show-up as an admin tab.  
Then I was able to dump a bunch of pre-existing models and migrations  
from the Calendar application I want to integrate with ease.

Understanding that this is very much a work in progress, I did want  
to make one note of interest:

When I created the Calendar extension and then ran my migrations I  
found out quickly that it doesn't work well to have a model named the  
same as the Extension (I had a Calendar model as well). I renamed my  
Calendar model, reversed the migrations by hand and everything  
migrated up fine the second time around.

Then in my calendar controller I dumped a scaffold :event_calendar  
and voila! I had a nifty interface for adding and removing calendars  
right within Radiant admin.

I know I for one see the maturation of these extensions as an  
important turning-point for Radiant as a project.

IMHO this robust and Rails friendly way of extending Radiant is key  
to allowing it to remain spartan. Though I might still prefer the CMS  
to be the plugin a la Comatose, this level (and method) of  
extensibility will mean the best of both worlds for most of those who  
just have CMS needs + a little something else.



So, John, with crystal ball in hand, what do you see as a likely  
timeframe for an official release which includes both Extensions and  
Page Types?