# Food for thought

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739>\
**Category:** Radiant CMS\
**Created:** [January 20, 2007, 5:31am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739 "2007-01-20T05:31:51Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 8\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 5:31am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/1 "2007-01-20T05:31:51Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 5:41am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/2 "2007-01-20T05:41:51Z")

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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 🙂

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 5:50am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/3 "2007-01-20T05:50:52Z")

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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

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 4:12pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/4 "2007-01-20T16:12:41Z")

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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](http://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

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 6:22am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/5 "2007-01-20T06:22:53Z")

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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](http://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 🙂

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**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 10:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/6 "2007-01-20T22:55:36Z")

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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

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 20, 2007, 9:44pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/7 "2007-01-20T21:44:30Z")

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Hi Andrew,

E-mail lists and forums go hand in hand with [www.nabble.com](http://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

> **[Day to day stuff](http://day-to-day-stuff.blogspot.com/)**
>
> Experiences from a hard core JVM programmer. Likes to keep things simple.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/b77776/32.png) [@andrewkendall](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andrewkendall)\
**Post date:** [January 21, 2007, 11:45am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/food-for-thought/82739/8 "2007-01-21T11:45:42Z")

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Erik van Oosten wrote:

> E-mail lists and forums go hand in hand with [www.nabble.com](http://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](http://groups-beta.google.com/group/radiantcms)

L