Last night I quietly rolled out the first official release of Radiant:
0.5 - Grindstone. This release was a stability release mostly targeted
toward making it easy for people to download and get started with
Radiant. Radiant now ships with a simple setup_database script which
makes it easy to get up and running with one of three default templates.
We also made it easy for people to install Radiant via Ruby Gems.
WHAT IS RADIANT CMS?
Radiant is a no-fluff content management system designed for small
teams. It’s similar to Movable Type or Textpattern, but is more than a
blogging engine. It’s a Web developer’s CMS with just enough features to
make it worthwhile. We’ve intentionally left the kitchen sink out!
Radiant features:
- An elegant user interface
- The ability to arrange pages in a hierarchy
- Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a
custom tagging language (Radius: http://radius.rubyforge.org) - Special page-oriented plugins called behaviors
- A simple user management/permissions system
- Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML
(it’s easy to create other filters) - Operates in two modes: dev and production depending on the URL
- A caching system which expires pages every 5 minutes
- Built using Ruby on Rails (which means that extending Radiant is
as easy as any other Rails application) - Licensed under the MIT-License
- And much more…
There’s even a live demo over on the project Web site:
INSTALLATION
We’ve worked hard to make it easy to install Radiant. For starters you
can download it with Ruby Gems:
% gem install --include-dependencies radiant
Once the Radiant gem is installed you have access to the radiant
command. The radiant command is similar to the rails command (if you
are from the Rails world. It’s how you generate a new Radiant instance
application. An instance application is an application that references
the source code which is located somewhere else (in this case the
Radiant gem.) So cd to the directory where you would like your
instance to be installed and type:
% radiant .
Next create a database for your application and setup the appropriate
config/database.yml file. You’ll find several examples in the config
directory. Radiant supports MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL.
Then run the script/setup_database command:
% script/setup_database production
And start up the test server:
% script/server
Finally, hit the /admin/ URL and you should be off to the races. See the
README file in the release for additional details.
If you are interested in other download options, visit the download
page: http://radiantcms.org/download/.
CONTRIBUTORS
Radiant wouldn’t be possible without the help of some fine people. The
following people have made contributions to this release:
- Matt McCray * Paul S. * Scott W.
- Sven Lauer * Tristan Boniver * Chris Corriveau
- Ryan P. * Luis L.
Thanks guys! If you’d like to hop on the development band wagon head on
over to our dev site (http://dev.radiantcms.org/).
SUPPORT
Perhaps the best place to get support is on the Radiant mailing list.
There’s a crowd of people there who have been hanging around for over a
month now. Newbie questions are welcome! To sign up, go to:
http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/
Enjoy!