2 questions about modifying radiant for my needs

I love Radiant! Great CMS!
I have a local copy and would like to try extending/changing it in two
ways - need a little help, or at least pointed in the right direction in
the code.

  1. I would like to modify things such that the edit page (main work
    area) and the file tree (tree structure of pages) are on the same page .
    I.E. the page hierarchy is on the left and the edit view is in the
    middle. Can you help me get started with this? what files would need
    to be modified etc?

  2. I would like to ultimately use this CMS to update the content of a
    site by sending the data(content, changes …) to the site via FTP. So I
    am thinking instead of just rendering to the screen, to somehow FTP the
    updates or complete site data to ultimate location, some other site.
    Does this make sense? So I guess instead of just ‘publish’ or ‘view
    site’, I need to create the ability to FTP and send the information to
    another location. Can you help me get started with this? What file
    would I insert such a method or logic and what might this FTP code look
    like? Seems like with Rails it might be easy to simply add a method
    that somehow wraps all the data pertaining to a site being controlled by
    Radiant and FTP’ing that information somewhere.

But I am new to Radiant and Rails for that matter, so your help would be
hugely appreciated!

JR

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