Radiant Factory

rpheath · November 29, 2007, 10:32pm

Hi Folks,

I’m launching a new service called Radiant Factory
(http://www.radiantfactory.com/
) - basically a theming service for Radiant.

Let me know what you think!

Ryan H.

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 2:49am

Do you provide design services or just take existing designs and work
them
over for Radiant? I can’t design my way out of a wet paper bag. I know
what I like and what I would like my website to look like I just can’t
make
it happen.

Later…
Richard

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 2:58am

I have the same question here. Am looking for a
designer to improve the looks of (http://210.98.49.34:3000). We already
use Radiant anyway.

saji

Richard H. [email protected] [2007-11-29 20:48:22 -0500]:

Hi Folks,
Post: [email protected]
Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant

Radiant mailing list
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

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 3:08am

I don’t know, I kind of like the clean look of you existing page. Not
too
much info to confuse the visitor, yet it explains everything.

The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable.

Please try again later.

Later…
Richard

On Nov 29, 2007 8:39 PM, Saji Njarackalazhikam H. [email protected]

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 3:19am

Saji,

I concur with Richard. Your design is very clean and probably only
needs a few finishing touches to integrate and re-balance certain
sections.

Sean

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 5:40am

Sean,

Thanks for the encouraging comments. Maybe I should sit down and
put the finishing touches as you suggested.

Thanks anyway for this wonderful CMS!

saji

Sean C. [email protected] [2007-11-29 20:18:41 -0600]:

Thanks for the compliments. I forgot to start the server. It is up now

The page you are looking for is temporarily unavailable.

Richard

Let me know what you think!
Radiant mailing list
KOREA
Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/
Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant

Radiant mailing list
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

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 4:01pm

Richard and Saji,

No, I’m not planning to provide design services, sorry. I can give you
some good referrals though. Email me at info at radiant factory dot
com if you’re interested.

Saji, i agree with the others - your site looks great. How are you
doing the sparklines and graphs in Radiant? Good work on that site.

Ryan

rpheath · December 1, 2007, 2:13pm

Hi Ryan,

Thanks for the encouraging comments. The sparklines are done with
the library described in

http://nubyonrails.com/articles/sparklines-graph-library-for-ruby

BTW, neither the sparklines or the graphs are done in Radiant. My
background is in climate research: though I do a bit with ruby, doing
anything with Rails is yet beyond me.

All the data and graphs are produced by our science team using
scientific software such as the NCAR command Language (http://
ncl.ucar.edu). We use a Drb based server to accept such data and
incorporate them into the Radiant webpage. Methods implemented
within the Drb server will create sparklines and other such
derivatives. (The radiant administrative interface is still a bit
daunting for some of our scientists - that is why we use a Drb client).

I am getting some of our web support team trained in Rails. We have
plans to create a Rails based interface that will produce some of
these graphs dynamically.

BTW, I was encouraged to use Radiant after reading your very well
written tutorial.

Best wishes,
saji

Saji H., APEC Climate Center,
Busan, Korea 611705
[email protected]

rpheath · November 30, 2007, 3:15am

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the compliments. I forgot to start the server. It is up now

saji
…

Richard H. [email protected] [2007-11-29 21:07:38 -0500]:

On Nov 29, 2007 8:39 PM, Saji Njarackalazhikam H. [email protected]

Do you provide design services or just take existing designs and work

Radiant mailing list
–
Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant

Radiant mailing list
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

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 3:13am

Ryan H. wrote:

The radiant administrative interface is still a bit daunting for
some of our scientists

I’ve run into this before - I guess I just take it for granted that
the admin interface is easy to use, because I like it. But that’s
not the case for everyone. I’m curious, what about the Admin interface
is daunting to your scientists, and how might it be improved?

OK, I’m not a scientist and it’s not daunting for me to use the admin
interface. But a couple of things would be nice to have (perhaps):

A way to search for a page without having to go through the tree
hierarchy. A nice neat auto-complete field that narrows down the list
of pages based on the text you type would be great. After a few levels
of hierarchy and a lot of pages, I imagine the current navigation will
start to get a bit tedious.
A way to change the published status of multiple pages from the index
page directly, rather than going to each page itself.
On the page editing interface, a small link to “View this page” -
it’s fine if it appears only after the page has been saved once (so that
Radiant can render that link). It’s a bit annoying to create a new
page, but then from the index page (“View Site”), there’s no way to get
to the page since the parent page that may be connecting to it is still
in cache… and you must either expire cache or type in the full URL or
something.
The “View Site” link to open up in a separate window.

I think I do really like the minimalist look of the admin page, but
some of the above ideas will hopefully not clutter it too much.

Cheers,
Mohit.
12/2/2007 | 10:11 AM.

rpheath · December 1, 2007, 9:00pm

The radiant administrative interface is still a bit daunting for
some of our scientists

I’ve run into this before - I guess I just take it for granted that
the admin interface is easy to use, because I like it. But that’s
not the case for everyone. I’m curious, what about the Admin interface
is daunting to your scientists, and how might it be improved?

BTW, I was encouraged to use Radiant after reading your very well
written tutorial.

That’s wonderful! Thanks for letting me know that!

Ryan

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 7:02am

Mohit,

Every one of your requests have been one way or another addressed by
some extensions I have written for Digital Pulp. I’ll see what I can do
to release the pertinent bits.

Sean

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 1:31pm

Can we make the edit page a little more friendly for those of us
without 1700x2400 displays?

I feel your pain. A couple of thoughts:

“Save Changes” and “Save and continue” buttons could go at the top,
perhaps level with the “Edit Page” heading, but floated to the right.
The same two buttons could be given access keys, e.g. S and C, so
that you can trigger them with a key command, rather than pushing
them with your cursor.

A

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 11:00am

I concur with every item on this list and would like to add one more.
For
such a minimalist interface editing a page sure does take up a lot of
vertical space. I find it very annoying to have to scroll down to save
every time.

Can we make the edit page a little more friendly for those of us
without
1700x2400 displays?

Later…
Richard

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 6:11pm

Thanks Sean!

Cheers,
Mohit.
12/3/2007 | 1:08 AM.

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 10:18pm

Putting the controls on a sidebar is OK with me. I would even be fine
with
a smaller text for the page title and various controls. I’m screen
height
challenged, not blind.

Hmmm…what about a way to customize the CSS of the Admin pages for each
install? Would that work? It wouldn’t even have to be anything fancy
like
a table in the DB, just a static file on the server would work for me.
We
could then change the look & feel of the pages pretty easily and to fit
within our own guidelines.

Later…
Richard

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 9:11pm

I think I prefer having the buttons underneath the form, because it is
more standard and fits the open-edit-save workflow. Moving the buttons
to the top breaks with convention.

What about a 2-column layout (similar to this:
Frog CMS - Content Management Simplified | Frog CMS)
, moving the meta-data form inputs to the second column? If some of
the metadata were moved out of the way horizontally, then the body of
the form could be shorter.

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 11:03pm

Richard,

This is rather trivial to do with an extension. Write your desired CSS,
put it in your extension public/stylesheets directory. Then put
something like this in your extension’s activate method:

SiteController.class_eval do

    before_filter :customize_admin_css

    def customize_admin_css

        include_stylesheet 'my_stylesheet'

   end

end

Obviously you’d want to name your stylesheet something else. Hope this
is helpful!

Sean

rpheath · December 3, 2007, 5:58am

Hi Ryan,

I’ve run into this before - I guess I just take it for granted that
the admin interface is easy to use, because I like it. But that’s
not the case for everyone. I’m curious, what about the Admin interface
is daunting to your scientists, and how might it be improved?

Too much information - we have some people producing El Nino
forecasts,
some El Nino monitoring information and another set maybe
some sort of summaries.

     Typically any one of these people have to access a certain
     page within the tree. Since we have a variety of products
     and many categories under each product, the typical
     "content provider" in APCC tends to get a bit lost in
     the branches and trunks of the Page tree, so to say.


   o It would have been nice if the "content provider" could
     chose to hide the branches and trunks not of interest to
     her/im.

   o This step may be done by the administrator instead.
     This may help protect the integrity of the system. We
     may not want all content providers to modify any of the
     pages in the tree. Currently any logged in "content
     provider" can modify anything s/he likes

Images - As you may have noticed, we need to display lots and
lots of images. It is not quite that easy to deal with
images through the admin interface.

     Radiant does not have support to upload images.
     But this is well-supported by extensions. However,
     in my experience, it is *not* painless to use the
     uploaded images. One has to use a set of tags to
     incorporate the images into the pages (not too
     convenient).

     Adding images to suddirectories under the public directory
     is an option. However for security reasons, out sysadmins
     do not permit "content providers" to access the Radiant
     root directory. Even if they upload to a ftp area in
     the server, there is an additional step of moving those
     files into the Radiant public directory

     o It would be nice to have a convenient way to access
       images through the Admin interface and to easily
       (less typing, yet intuitive) 'markup' the images in
       the associated pages.

Mainly these are the items. So what I did was to make a customized
client for each of our “content providers”. Since I understand the
common-language used in this community, it was more convenient to
go this way… also a convenient way to restrict access to the
Radiant admin interface.

saji

rpheath · December 2, 2007, 10:30pm

Ryan H. said the following on 02/12/07 03:08 PM:

I think I prefer having the buttons underneath the form, because it is
more standard and fits the open-edit-save workflow. Moving the buttons
to the top breaks with convention.

What’s to prohibit top AND bottom. You’re going to be close to one or
the other

Or have a scrolling region in a frame (of some kind) and the
buttons/controls are in the frame.

What about a 2-column layout (similar to this: Frog CMS - Content Management Simplified | Frog CMS)
, moving the meta-data form inputs to the second column? If some of
the metadata were moved out of the way horizontally, then the body of
the form could be shorter.

Does that left hand part scroll independently from the (presumably
fixed) right hand part?

–
Clear the battlefield and let me see
All the profit from our victory.
You talk of freedom, starving children poor.
Are you deaf when you hear the season’s call?
Were you there to watch the earth be scorched?
Did you stand beside the spectral torch?
Know the leaves of sorrow turned their face,
Scattered on the ashes of disgrace.