[Radiant] Mental Branch "Extensions" Notes

[Keith Bingman]

I just want to second this, the extensions are very well thought out  
and pretty easy to use even in their very raw state. I have a very  
simple assets management system (based on acts_as_attachment) that  
took maybe a few hours to set up. Most of that was making sure that  
the views integrated nicely into Radiant.

I found another small gotcha with the migrations. If you have more  
than one extension, you do have to make sure that the migrations are  
properly numbered. 2 "No. !" doesn't work. And the rake task provides  
no feedback, I have gotten used to the new Rake  task telling me what  
it is doing. Not a biggie, but it would be nice.

All in all, this is a really great addition to Radiant and vastly  
increases its value, at least to me. I can't wait until an official  
release.

One sort of funny note: I tried to add tagging to Radiant while I was  
at it. I used the acts_as_taggable plugin (not the Gem) from DHH and  
only had to add one line to the Page model and one line in the  
control, plus a very small change in the views. It worked great.  
Except that it totally broke the Radius tagging system and the front  
end rendered nothing.

Just for fun and because I had just watched the original Battlestar  
Galactica with it's robotic "Daggits", I renamed the plugin to  
"acts_as_daggable", changed all the instances of "tag" to "dag" and  
the thing works. Really well, actually. So adding tagging to Radiant  
should be very easy, but we do have to watch our namespaces.

Keith Bingman
keith at keithbingman.com




On Nov 13, 2006, at 7:59 PM, Loren Johnson wrote:

>
> 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?
>
>
>
>
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