[Radiant] Repost: KCKCC redesign and RadiantCMS

[Sean Cribbs]

First, my apologies to those who are also on the Ruby On Rails Higher Ed 
list for reposting this.  I thought you guys might find it interesting, 
and evidence that Radiant is 'production-worthy'.

Cheers,
Sean
----------------------------------

Jason,
 
Sure! I actually have a set of blog posts I want to write about building 
the site, but having just released it last week, we're swamped with 
change requests and irate staff. (You know how it is!)  But I'll give 
you the sort-of-short version.
 
Using Radiant for the live site was not our first choice.  We wanted to 
purchase a very expensive enterprise-level CMS, but the funding or the 
will to pay for it just wasn't there.  After we were forced to find an 
Open Source alternative, the only option that had most closely met our 
requirements was ezPublish.  However, we quickly found that it was a 
pain to use and too inflexible (or too flexible? I'm not sure) and the 
performance would be abysmal.  So in the end we chose Radiant, partly 
because of its ease-of-use, and partly because I had enough experience 
with it and with Rails to build anything extra we needed.  We had also 
used Radiant for prototyping our navigation design for usability 
testing, so some of the team was familiar with it.
Luckily, just before we began building the site, Radiant's up-and-coming 
extension system came to a stage where it was workable, so I took the 
plunge.  While the rest of the team worked on sanitizing content, I 
built several extensions and along the way found some bugs and submitted 
patches to the core.  On the live site there are six extensions that I 
wrote or ported:
 
1) Events calendar - powers the academic calendar page and some dates 
here-and-there.  It's a basic CRUD application with Events belonging to 
multiple Calendars, etc.  It implements basic tags for accessing the 
data that can be used in any page.
2) Expiry tags - just two tag definitions that allow you to have 
time-sensitive content.  Based on my most recent blog post to 
radiantcms.org.
3) Mailer - a port and modification of Matt McCray's original Mailer 
behavior.  This is in use ALL OVER the site.  Except for very few cases, 
where there's a form, it's the Mailer extension.
4) LDAP/Personnel Directory - One of our major goals was to stop being 
responsible for keeping personnel data up-to-date on the site.  So we 
worked with the IT people to get full-read access to the Netware 
directory.  This is a combination CRUD/integration extension.  I created 
saved or "canned" LDAP queries that could be run easily from a tag in 
any page.  The admin interface is neat too because it uses Ajax to allow 
you to test your query as you are creating it.
5) Search - based on the old, original Search behavior, except I 
stripped out the live-preview functionality and added a little tag for 
truncating and stripping tags from results pages (so you can see a 
little snippet like Google shows).  In the future, I'd like to port the 
acts_as_ferret version, as it will produce more reliable results.
6) Syllabi - One of the mainstays of the old site were the "course 
descriptions".  This extension combines a basic CRUD app (3 models - 
Prefix/Department, Course, and Syllabus (acts_as_attachment)) with two 
special page-types that assist in displaying the syllabi.  One page just 
lists the prefixes with links to the virtual subpage which displays the 
individual courses and links to the syllabi. This one deserves a 
detailed blog post.
 
As I mentioned, constructing all of these made me even more intimate 
with the source code of Radiant.  Thus, I found bugs and submitted these 
patches:
 
1) Added a Rake task for running tests in your extensions and fixed the 
generated test_helper.rb
2) Fixed some Javascript issues with showing/hiding the slug/breadcrumbs 
in the Page edit view.
3) Factored out the SiteMap Javascript class into a separate file, 
rather than being at the top of the template in the Page edit view.
 
Just last week, John Long accepted me to the core team, so I'll be 
squashing more bugs in the future.
 
Now, the big problem everyone has with Rails apps is how to deploy.  
Because I had tried it out and loved it, we went with Litespeed server.  
It's practically a no-brainer to set up Rails applications and its speed 
executing Rails and PHP scripts is legendary --- something like 30% 
faster than FastCGI!  It's been awesome having a web-based admin that 
makes sense and is easy to use, too.  So far, we have had NO problems 
with it.  Probably the best part is no zombie FCGI processes!
 
So, it looks like I made the short story long.  Overall, Radiant has 
worked beautifully for us.  Our whole team has enjoyed using it, and 
it's like night-and-day from what we used to do.  I would highly 
recommend it to others with this caveat: Radiant is not at the stage 
where people who are not especially computer and web-savvy should be 
entering content.  Although it is a boon for web developers and 
designers, it would scare away the poor Math department secretary.  It 
also has a long way to go in terms of providing flexible 
user-privileges, although I could see an extension handling that.  But 
if you have a ticket/change-request system already, it will make edits 
that much faster because you don't have to FTP them up to the server.  
The only other thing that I think it lacks is a nice asset-management 
interface, but there are a few extensions out there for it and I have 
one of my own up my sleeve.
 
In terms of Radiant's longevity, who can say?  I think it is gaining 
momentum, but even if it weren't I wouldn't worry as much because it is 
open-source.  Moving to something else in the future is always going to 
be painful, but we felt Radiant's hands-off approach to managing content 
would ease a transition because the content is so close to the rendered 
page.
 
Hope this answers your questions...
 
Cheers,
 
Sean Cribbs
Web Services, KCKCC
http://www.kckcc.edu/
 
 >>> jason.garber at emu.edu 1/6/2007 9:03 AM >>>

Sean,
Congratulations on finishing the KCKCC site redesign!  If you have a
few minutes, would you mind sharing a bit on how it went?  I see that
you used RadiantCMS and I've seen your posts on the Radiant blog, so
I'd like to hear about your use of Radiant: how well it's worked, how
you've extended it, how content creators have accepted it, etc.  Would
you recommend it to others?  Where does it fall short?  Is it something
you predict will be around for a long while (increasing momentum) or
will it die off in a few years and require a painful transition to
something else?

Hope you don't mind sharing your experience with this group.  Thanks in
advance!

Jason Garber
Eastern Mennonite University

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