Hey all!
You’re all probably getting annoyed with hearing from me by this point.
However, I may have some suggestions pertaining not directly to Radiant
itself but moreso better communications.
I find that maillists are great for the most part for keeping in contact
with people, clients, members and so forth and to have linear
conversations that may not be pertinent down the road. One benefit with
Radiant’s mailgroup setup is that you can search the history of the
mailgroups.
However, speaking from someone who has developed applications in a group
setting as well as now being a new adopter of a package developed as a
group, I’m starting to see that mailgroups and their lack of continuity
and constraint of ‘flow’ in a linear message-by-message system, the lack
of ability to review a group of messages discussing the same topic
quickly and even moreso difficult when you toss in the fact when people
change the subject of a line of messages making searching impossible.
My first suggestion is a decent way of communicating. I know you may all
groan when I say ‘forums’, but right now the forums may be the best
option to manage this level of communications effectively. I’m sure it
would significantly reduce ‘reasking’ (like I’m sure I did with my last
email), hunting for links, tracking suggestions and more. I feel that
with the level of emails coming through the group and the great expanse
they cover, that forums would be far more logical, not only for now, but
for the future and ability to track what has been discussed in the past.
My second suggestion is the wiki being more actively maintained by not
just developers, but the community as well. It is a much more logical
way to maintain an online ‘manual’ of sorts where people can place more
and more documentation for the benefit of the users and developers
alike. While I feel that the wiki was a great addition; the
implementation is not being carried through by all.
I hope I am not over-stepping my boundaries; after being on this group
for a few weeks now, stomping around the site looking for more
information on expanding, these are the feelings I felt myself. I love
this system; it’s the first CMS I’ve actually enjoyed messing with. I
can be as simplistic or detailled as I want to be and makes it easy to
maintain as well. I am a fan of Ruby and Ruby on Rails, which makes
this system that much more enjoyable to use. I just do not want to see
Radiant go downhill and would like to help however I can.
Thank you for listening to my opinion 
Andrew
Hear, hear!
I’ve been rather a silent lurker around these parts as well, though
I’ve been very interested in implementing Radiant for my car club’s
web site, which will probably entail me writing a few behaviors
(event calendar, signup and survey forms, etc.). One thing that
really ‘sells’ a platform (particularly something like a CMS) is when
it’s easy to find out what the wealth of plugins/extensions/etc.
(behaviors in Radiant lingo) are, how active the community is, and so
on. However, mailing lists are difficult for casual access, and so a
forum can be helpful, particularly for people just getting their feet
wet. Now, we do have a gateway with ruby-forum, which is great. I
think the Wiki needs some work, particularly in terms of listing what
sorts of extra behaviors are available for Radiant, what future plans
are, and so on.
I’ll be thrilled to donate some of my time later this Spring when I’m
no longer spending all my evenings on my Rails-based startup 
Andrew,
You’re right. However, I think the efforts (or intentions thereof) are
out there. I started messing with the quick start page, sadly I really
haven’t had the time to finish even though have every intention to do
so. Some people have already turned useful mailing lists post into
proper Wiki entries. So I think the intention is there is just that
I’m assuming most of us have busy lives that forbid us from spending
couple of hours writing and re-arranging and so forth.
Forums are the proberbial double-edge sword. In concept it sounds like
a great idea; however in practice, forums require a lot of attention
and time. Have seen way too many times forums turning into boxing
rinks. I’ve also seen forums turned into SPAM post galore and e-mail
harvesters paradise. Yes they can and are very useful, but John and/or
someone he chooses would have to be lurking around making sure things
roll smothly.
Yes the documentation needs to be improved and yes communication
could be improved; however, I’m not sure forums are the solution.
IMO
It was mentioned yesterday while I was online, so I thought it bore
reminding to the whole group.
RadiantCMS has an official channel on irc.freenode.net called
#radiantcms. For the most part it has been quiet, but it is a good
place to ask those repetitive or specific questions that might clutter
up the list. When I’m not insanely busy or away from my office, I tend
to sit in the channel, and I helped two people yesterday with problems.
Just like the #rubyonrails channel, which has now exploded in numbers,
if we develop a community there, we can develop more expertise and more
interest in the project.
Just more ‘food for thought’.
Sean
Ruben!
Yes, I do agree that forums can be a handful to manage for sure; I’ve
ran a few in my time and helped for years with others ( www.lulu.com for
example ) and understand the pitfalls. However, the best solution to
remove part of the double-edge is to create a firm but fair set of rules
to maintain order; use a good forums set that allows you to hide emails
and use PMs in-forums (anyone can get a bot onto the mailing list and
farm away 10x easier than a good forum package; as well, your search
places the email right in plaintext as well-- any good email sniffer app
is gonna find them all, converting from at to @ while it goes)
as well as email verification and more; as well as you retain a
respectible forum moderator team which can watch for problems before
they arise, lifting the stress off your and other developers’ shoulders
by placing it in non-developer hands. While it takes a bit to get them
rolling, they are effective in the long run as well. I am brainstorming
what else may ease this as well.
Andy 
Great idea!
Honestly; I feel that Mailing L. --DO-- (Contrary to what you may
feel of my words) have a place, especially for a system like this.
Announcements by the developers, community and such make great use of
this method of communications. Troubleshooting in a group setting is
pretty good for this as well in some instances as well as a short
discussions.
I was thinking that I could possibly host a forum as well if we need to.
We shall see how things pan out.
Andrew
Hi Andrew,
E-mail lists and forums go hand in hand with www.nabble.com. I was
surprised the Radiant mailing list is not on there yet. I’ll get on it
right away.
Regards,
Erik.
Andrew K. wrote:
My first suggestion is a decent way of communicating. I know you may all
groan when I say ‘forums’, but right now the forums may be the best
option to manage this level of communications effectively…
–
Erik van Oosten
Erik van Oosten wrote:
E-mail lists and forums go hand in hand with www.nabble.com. I was
surprised the Radiant mailing list is not on there yet. I’ll get on it
right away.
A mirror of this list (“read-only”, i.e. no public subscription and
posts, but useful for searches) is also available at:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/radiantcms
L
