Re: [Radiant] Our first site in Radiant, finally

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 10:44:10 -0800

Hi Loren,

congratulations that you finished your site, while i am still working on my first radiant powered site :-) And it looks nice, too.

Just in case you did't notice it yet, some links provided in the navigation bar above the header point to non existing parts of your site.

Bye,
Tino

2006/11/1, Loren Johnson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:

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:


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
AIM: NL7XF


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