Hello all,
After lurking on the list for a while and checking out the Radiant home
page
I have a question. I am looking for a lightweight CMS framework for my
business (KangarooBox.com) to serve up mostly static pages. I was
initially
going to just use RoR but there are quite a few holes that I might need
filled in the future (authentication, shopping carts, etc.) so I went in
search of a framework. Radiant looks to be what I need but from what I
can
see it really wants to be a blogging engine. While I will need a blog
(doesn’t everyone 
I don’t want to try and force Radiant to do
something
it’s not designed for. So my question is this, is Radiant the thing to
use
on a small commercial website or should it just stick to blogs?
The one major thing I’m looking for right now is some sort of survey
extension. I am an old programmer so I could write something but I’m
also
lazy and would rather use someone else’s work. Is there anything
like
that for Radiant? If not, do you know how hard it would be to create it
or
what other RoR solutions I might try?
Thanx!
Richard
Sean,
Excellent information! I didn’t find that user list before I posted the
question but I see now that there are quite a few commercial sites on
Radiant. And I get a built-in blogging engine as well.
Now for my other question, is there any code for conducting on-line
surveys
available for Radiant? Would this be an extension or an add-on of some
type? I’m still getting familiar with the Radiant terms and don’t quite
know where everything goes.
Thanx!
Richard
An extension should be able to do this fine. Looking around, I haven’t
seen one yet, but it would probably be a good excercise in learning
both extensions and how Radiant works.
Here’s what you probably need at a minimum:
- A SurveyPage (descended from the standard Page class)
- Some Radius tags to help you build the survey forms in a standard
way, declared inside the SurveyPage class (so to create a new survey
you’d just create a new SurveyPage in the standard Page interface and
use these tags)
- A SurveyController that all of the survey forms point to and
handles saving the survey data
- An Admin::SurveyController that allows you as the admin to
interface with the results (unless you’re fine with the results being
public)
- Some standard ActiveRecord descended class to handle saving the
results
Like I said before, this will definitely be a good learning experience
since that list covers a good deal of the things you need to know for
extensions (except maybe virtual pages, but I don’t think they’d be
any use in this case).
One recommendation I’d give would be to freeze radiant into the vendor
directory so you can easily look through what’s already there. I’ve
found that page.rb (especially find_by_url and everything dealing with
rendering), site_controller.rb, and standard_tags.rb are the most
important ones for getting a good picture of how Radiant works.
Hope this helps and if anyone more seasoned has a better idea, let me
know.
-Andrew
Richard,
Radiant does sound like a good fit. Simply because a lot of people use
it for blog software doesn’t mean it has to be that. Take a look at the
various sites linked from the wiki page called RadiantUsers. There’s a
lot of sites that use the built-in templates (or modified versions) but
there are also sites built from scratch. Radiant does especially well
with “brochure-ware” sites because of the flexibility given to the
content designer and its orientation toward mostly-static content. For
reference, here are a few sites built by core-team members:
Me: http://kckcc.edu (ignore the design, they screwed it up after I
left)
Daniel: http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com/
Loren: http://diopa.org
Cheers,
Sean
Richard,
Yes, an online survey would be best implemented in an extension. I
don’t know of any currently available. I’m interested to see what you
come up with!
Sean
The following project http://informl.folklogic.net/doc (also a RoR
application)
may have some basic capacity for surveys and gathering/organising the
responses.
Since it is built on RoR it may be relatively easy to adapt the
basic mechanisms into a Radiant extension.
saji
- A SurveyController that all of the survey forms point to and
On 9/14/07, Richard H. [email protected] wrote:
lot of sites that use the built-in templates (or modified versions) but
going to just use RoR but there are quite a few holes that I might need
The one major thing I’m looking for right now is some sort of survey
Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
Post: [email protected]
Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
–
Saji N. Hameed
APEC Climate Center +82 51 668 7470
National Pension Corporation Busan Building 12F
Yeonsan 2-dong, Yeonje-gu, BUSAN 611705 [email protected]
KOREA
But how do I make it so I can have a dynamic directory under the ‘jobs’
page
Touching the Radiant routes, defined in the routes.rb file.
In your case maybe what you need is a mixed Radiant<->Rails site
(with
the RadiantOnRails extension).
/AITOR
Hi everyone!
I am asking the same question - is Radiant right for me? Obviously the
CMS capabilities are great, but I need to be able to serve some dynamic
content too - for instance - I have a load of jobs I need to list and
they need to be shown on a page as required:
http://www.mydomain.com/jobs - all jobs
http://www.mydomain.com/jobs/my-job-category - all jobs for the chosen
category
http://www.mydomain.com/job/my-job - the job matching the selected id
Obviously I can add an extension for storing the jobs info and I can
create a jobs page to show ALL jobs. But how do I make it so I can have
a dynamic directory under the ‘jobs’ page. I note this has been done on
two of the links Sean provides (http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com and
http://diopa.org). Well, I assume it has, either that or someone is
doing a lot of admin work keeping everything up-to-date.
Any help would be appreciated…
Thanks
Jay
Sean C. wrote:
Richard,
Radiant does sound like a good fit. Simply because a lot of people use
it for blog software doesn’t mean it has to be that. Take a look at the
various sites linked from the wiki page called RadiantUsers. There’s a
lot of sites that use the built-in templates (or modified versions) but
there are also sites built from scratch. Radiant does especially well
with “brochure-ware” sites because of the flexibility given to the
content designer and its orientation toward mostly-static content. For
reference, here are a few sites built by core-team members:
Me: http://kckcc.edu (ignore the design, they screwed it up after I
left)
Daniel: http://www.thegroggysquirrel.com/
Loren: http://diopa.org
Cheers,
Sean
I’d recommend a virtual page. Check out how the archive pages work in
Radiant.
Basically, you would create a JobPage page type that overrides, at the
very least:
-
Page#virtual? to return true
-
Page#find_by_url to retrieve the Job for the requested id and store
it in an instance variable for the page (let’s say @job)
-
probably title, breadcrumb, and slug
-
some Radius tags to use in the body of the page that allow you to
access the data in the @job instance variable
You may also need to define a JobListingPage to be the parent to the
JobPage and allow you to list links to the job pages.
-Andrew
You also now have the option of using a regular Rails controller to
handle dynamic content and still share the visual design with your
Radiant installation, via the share_layouts extension. On the other
hand, I have had great success with virtual pages. The syllabi/course
descriptions on KCKCC.edu used this method
(http://kckcc.edu/academics/course-descriptions). All child pages of
the linked page are a single virtual page that changes its contents
based on the URL.
Sean
Great! Thanks guys, I’ll look into each of the above and post back when
I decide what is the best solution in my case…
Is there an info page for the share_layouts extension? I can’t find much
information about it 