# Best practices for managing CSS, JavaScript, images? **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [February 20, 2008, 6:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681 "2008-02-20T18:04:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 8\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 6:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/1 "2008-02-20T18:04:09Z")
Greetings, I’m just ramping up on Radiant. Apologies if I’ve missed this in a FAQ somewhere, but I’m looking for some recommendations on managing these types of assets on a Radiant-based site. I found a mailing list thread from 2006, but it didn’t seem to have a conclusion. With non-Radiant sites I have Apache serve up these static files, bypassing Rails entirely. What are the recommended best practices with Radiant? I’d like to manage them through the web interface, so that other folks don’t have to deal with Subversion, deployment, etc. Do folks generally just embed the CSS and JavaScript in a layout and serve it dynamically? And caching? What about images (icons, backgrounds, etc.)? I’d like a way to upload and delete them from a browser, again to avoid Subversion and deployment hassles. It looks like the Gallery extension might work for this. Any other recommendations? Thanks! Tim Jones Barbary Codes and Data ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 6:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/2 "2008-02-20T18:12:25Z")
Tim, Chris P., with whom I’ve spoken privately, is working on an extension that will allow you to manage CSS and JavaScript separate from the page sitemap and have them be cached in some reasonable place so they can be served by your web server. In the meantime, you can create pages in the sitemap that have special layouts that specify their content type. It means an extra hit to Radiant to get the CSS or JS, but it’s a good interim solution. To accomplish this, I would create a child of the homepage called “Stylesheets”, and create a layout for it like this: Name: CSS Content type: text/css Content: \ Then create child pages of “Stylesheets” that are your individual stylesheets, modifying the slug to end in “.css” if you desire. You can do the same for JS. Cheers, Sean ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 6:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/3 "2008-02-20T18:17:44Z")
Sean, you’re too fast… Well Timothy, you’re in luck. At John’s request, I have put together an extension to manage CSS & JS files as assets separate from normal pages. I’ve got a little rearranging that he’s asked for before I release it into the wild. Look for an announcement here soon - probably by this weekend. In the meantime, Sean’s explanation saved me some time explaining it here and works well enough for how (though we’ve all felt it a little hack-ish – hence the new solution). As to other assets, Sean has a very well used PageAttachments extension, Andrea F. has a Gallery extension and Keith B. also has an Assets extension (though he’ll be the first to tell you it’s not production ready right now). Links and info on these third party extensions can be found here: [http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Thirdparty\_Extensions](http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Thirdparty_Extensions) -Chris ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 10:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/4 "2008-02-20T22:31:55Z")
I’ve just got onto using radiant last week, it’s been great to get up to speed fast and be able to slam out some sites that have been languishing. While I’ve been able to install some extensions like shard fine others won’t load when I issue: rake db:dbmigrate:extensions I receive the following error: Could not load extension from file: meta\_data\_extension. #\ Which I’m unsure of how to resolve. thanks in advance Brian Loomis Brian Loomis removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid (208) 562-3944 ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2008, 10:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/5 "2008-02-20T22:49:09Z")
Make sure that the directory containing the extension is named the same as the \*\_extension.rb file inside it. If it’s metadata\_extension.rb, name the directory metadata, etc. Sean ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2008, 12:07am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/6 "2008-02-21T00:07:47Z")
I did change the extension folder name to match the .rb file then ran the command again with this error: Could not load extension from file: page\_meta\_extension\_extension. #\ Am I to load extensions in to the extensions folder at the root of site or the entensions folder in vendors where the three that radiant comes with are located/ shards loaded and worked from the root extension folder but page\_meta data will not. On Feb 20, 2008, at 2:48 PM, Sean C. wrote: > > languishing. > > > > Radiant mailing list > > Site: [http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant](http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant) > > Brian Loomis > > removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid > > (208) 562-3944 ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2008, 9:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/7 "2008-02-21T09:50:10Z")
Sounds good, Chris - also looking forward to this one, just what I need 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/a3d4f5/32.png) [@Timothy\_Jones](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Timothy_Jones)\ **Post date:** [February 21, 2008, 12:33am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-practices-for-managing-css-javascript-images/129681/8 "2008-02-21T00:33:10Z")
You are having the same problem still. Don’t use \_extension on the directory name. Sean