Will, You really are asking hundred-dollar questions, some of which are the same ones I've been asking. I've been hearing that Radiant is a CMS and that it is primarily geared toward serving up content. That's true. However, like you, I have the need to integrate other "pages" into my site that interface with the user (allowing him to logon, complete a form, do data entry, etc.). Basically, what you're wanting is a hybrid. You want to capitalize on what Radiant does well and interject in a few areas with what Rails does well. At least, that's my goal.
I've really toiled over this wondering what would be the best practice. Making loose use of the 80:20 rule, 80% of my needs are met by Radiant in excellent fashion. However, 20% of my needs are not. They are, however, met by Rails which--go figure--just so happens to be what Radiant was built on! This naturally has me asking: If Rails is right there under the hood, how come I can't *easily* leverage it for my custom pages? Additionally, why do I have to sacrifice one for the other. Can't I have "Radiant on Rails" and make use of both? I haven't found the obvious answer at this point, though I would be all too happy to hear what others are doing. Or even if this is a typical problem, which, perhaps, it isn't. Here's what I ultimately decided to do. It may not be the best choice, but it's what came to mind. First, I started with Radiant as content management is the core of my particular site. Now, I am getting ready to transition into the next phase, where I will plug into the site the user-interactive pages. Basically, I'm going to write a separate Rails application that accesses the same Radiant database. (I'm using the same database since it already has the app-specific tables for which I added back-end interfaces into Radiant.) I'm going to overlay the Rails app on top of the Radiant site. That is, I'm going to (attempt to) use Apache mod_rewrite to properly dispatch incoming URLs to the right application: RadiantCMS or CustomRailsApp. I'm going to attempt to make the pages in the CustomRailsApp look like the pages found in Radiant. I'm going to attempt to disguise the URLs so that the custom pages look like they are part of the same Radiant site. The idea is to make these two separate apps (each running on their own mongrels) appear seamlessly integrated. I don't feel good about this. It feels like a kludge. What I'd like to do is write extensions--just like those I'm already starting to write on the back end--for the front end. I'd like to be able to do this within the context of a Radiant page so that I can take advantage of Radiant's offerings (snippets, custom tags, layouts, etc.) and Rail's offerings (simplified CRUD). If I were a Ruby/Rails veteran I'd develop just this sort of functionality/feature. Unfortunately, I'm still relatively green and so I'm looking at more basic alternatives. It's been recommended that I create custom tags to accomplish some of this. I don't like the idea. Why am I writing custom tags to do something that Rails already knows how to do? Writing custom tags to accomplish Rails CRUD operations feels ludicrous. I feel like that would be learning Chinese to tell an Chinese-English interpreter to tell my English speaking friend something that I could just tell him myself. I do wish to make it clear: I think Radiant is superb. I love Radius, the simplicity of page parts, and its extensibility. It's just inches away from being incredible. It's a matter of lessening the division between itself and Rails so that hybrid sites won't be such a difficult matter. If you run into any good ideas, I'd like to hear them. Who knows, maybe "front-end extensions" won't be far off... :) Respectfully, Mario T. Lanza -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@lists.radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
