Looks like it’s time for another release of Radiant:
http://radiantcms.org/download/
This is the first serious release of Radiant in well over 6 months. The
big news in this release is that we have created a first-class extension
system to make it easier for you to tailor Radiant to meet your needs.
Developers can now add their own models, views, and controllers and
completely customize the administrative interface.
WHAT IS RADIANT CMS?
Radiant is a no-fluff content management system made for designers and
programmers and is ideal for use on small teams. It is similar to
Movable Type or Textpattern, but is much more than a blogging engine.
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) - A dynamic extension system
- 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:
http://radiantcms.org/demo/
WHAT’S NEW IN THIS RELEASE?
- Added support for extensions–an extremely flexible way to extend
Radiant - Merged Behaviors into the Page class; subclass page now instead
- Improved database support for Postgres and Sqlite
- Limited support for SQL Server
- Exceptions from tags now bubble up during testing
- Page parts are now sorted by ID so the order that you create them in
is preserved [Josh F.] - Implemented tag documentation DSL and UI [Sean C.]
- Reworked the setup code
- Renamed script/setup_database to rake db:bootstrap
- Reworked the upgrade code to work around rake tasks
- Added rake tasks for freezing and unfreezing radiant to the edge
- r:children:each, r:children:first, and r:children:last now all accept
the same ordering and limit attributes and have the same defaults - Snippets are now responsive to global context via the r:page tag. This
means that any tags inside r:page will refer to the page currently
being rendered, i.e. the page requested, not the local contextual
page
via tags like r:children:each, etc. This is most relevant to
recursive
snippets like the sitemapper example [Sean C.] - r:navigation now uses the pipe character (“|”) to delimit URLs in the
urls attribute rather than the semi-colon - :date now accepts a “for” attribute that specifies which attribute of
the page to render. Valid values of the attribute are published_at,
updated_at, created_at, and now. - Created the r:cycle tag to make alternating tables and lists possible
- Added popups for filter and tag documentation inside the page editing
interface - Added support for optimistic locking for all models [Daniel Shepherd]
- Added support to Radiant::Config for boolean values [Sean C.]
- Caching no longer stores the headers and body in the same file [Daniel
Shepherd] - Added support for the X-Sendfile header that works in conjunction with
caching to speed it up (by default X-Sendfile support is off) [Daniel
Shepherd] - Moved the images and stylesheets into images/admin and
stylesheets/admin respectively to make it easier for Radiant’s assets
to coexist easily with the site’s assets - Improved the Javascript that automatically updates the slug and
breadcrumb based off of the title so that it now response to all
change events - For the full scoop on what’s changed see Sean C.’ detailed post:
What's New in Radiant 0.6 - Sean Cribbs
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 project
for a website. 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.
Then run the rake bootstrap task:
% rake production db:bootstrap
And start up the test server:
% script/server -e production
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/.
UPGRADING FROM 0.5.x
The upgrade process changed significantly from last release, so listen
up! To upgrade an existing installation, BACKUP YOUR DATABASE, update
the gem, and create a new Radiant project using the instructions above.
Then point Radiant to the right database by editing config/database.yml
and execute the following command in your project directory:
% rake db:migrate
If you have problems during the upgrade, please let us know.
CONTRIBUTORS
Radiant wouldn’t be possible without the help of some fine people. The
following people have made contributions to this release:
- Alexander H. * Adam W. * Sean S.
- Sean C. * Brian G. * Bodhi Philpot
- Andrew B. * Jesse Newland * Josh F.
- Daniel S. * Matte E. * Jacob B.
- Chris P.
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
The best place to get support is definitely on the Radiant mailing list.
There’s a crowd of people there who have been hanging around for many
moons now. Newbie questions are welcome! To sign up, go to:
http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/
The Radiant mailing list is also accessible via Ruby forum:
http://www.ruby-forum.com/forum/21
Enjoy!
