Does anyone have a successful example out there of putting Radiant in
the vendor directory of an existing full-scale Rails app and having
it play nicely?
I’ve tried unsuccessfully in the past, however with the final polish
on 0.6 (and now 0.61) I’m ready to give it another shot.
I have an app I would like to do this with that I’ll be working on in
a week or two.
For my use here are the two main issues that I know of are:
Routes… I can load my app’s routes first I essentially override
everything but the final Radiant default “page not found” route.
Rendering of snippets or page parts with Radius tags in them
straight in to my Rails app view… In particular, I imagine making a
helper in my app for calling the Radiant content. Is there a way to
render the snippet or part directly without creating a new
PageContext every time it goes to render (I’d be doing this all
through a Rails helper method I imagine…)
Less important to me, but interesting… the reuse of Layouts. Can
I pull a layout as a Rails layout, ERB render and then do a final
Radius render? Anyone tried this?
I’m working on the same thing right now. I currently have a Radiant
extension that allows Radiant to live in /vendor while having a Rails
app at it’s current location with only a slight modification required
for config/routes.rb to work properly.
It also has the ability to insert a snippet using a helper as you
suggested, although I don’t know how robust it is depending on what
radius tags are in that snippet. And yes, as you mentioned, it
creates a Page object to do this.
I’m also very interested in allowing Rails pages to leverage Radiant
layouts, and that is the next thing I plan to work on. Let me know
if you’re interested in seeing the extension I have so far. I plan
on creating a Rubyforge project for it, but I haven’t gotten around
to that yet. Perhaps we can work together to get this done. I also
think that Sean was working on the layout problem, too. So maybe he
already has made some progress in that area.
Funny – I knew I talked to someone about this at RailsConf and I
just couldn’t remember who… Now I remember our discussion well.
Yes, I’d very much like to help out in whatever way I can. I really
want to see this happen and end-up with something that makes the
integration dead simple to accomplish.
Love to see what you’ve got so far and talk more. It’d be especially
nice to see how you’re using it in your existing app. I still have
your card here, I’ll give you a shout later today or tomorrow to talk
approaches and see in what way I might be able to pitch-in, etc.
Maybe it’d be nice to set a date and time for you, Sean and myself
(and anyone else interested) to meet-up in #radiantcms IRC on this
topic…
Glad there is something already happening on this front!
Hello everybody
I have a site with a node page called news, inside that I have some
subpages and some other nodes with subpages in them.
I am using children:each to show all subpages of news, but I need to see
subpages of other nodes too called for example sction1 and section2. So
I put another cycle children:each inside the first one.
It is ok, but I see the nodes pages too.
I am trying to use unless_url matches=“section\d$” to match all pages
that ends with that url to avoid displaying nodes pages, but it doesn’t
work. Is there some special way to use regexp inside radiant?
Or maybe exist tag like unless_parent but matching if a page
has_children?
Thanks to everybody
–
Francesco L.
Ymir s.r.l.
Viale Verona 190/11
38100 Trento
I’m working right now to get a project created on RubyForge and
trying to come up with a reasonable name for the extension. How does
‘RadiantFromRails’ sound?
I’m up for getting together with you and Sean on IRC. I’d really
like to hear Sean’s thoughts about how he might approach the issue of
layouts as I haven’t really spent any time thinking about the
implementation yet.
Let me know when you get it set up, I’m anxious to give it a spin.
Once I am sitting down to do that I’ll feed my experience back to you
on how it goes.
Do you have a client use case for the integration? I think you said
you did, but it’d be good to know your requirements as it seems that
a completely general purpose integration method could be a stretch…
Feel free to AIM, call or email me if you’d like to bat any part of
the implementation details around with someone.
It will help if you can post the code snippet with the nested
<r:children:each … tags in it to look at. If I am understanding
what you’re describing correctly, yes I’d expect it to work as well.
If you’re still stuck post that section of code and maybe I can help
more.
I’m working right now to get a project created on RubyForge and
trying to come up with a reasonable name for the extension. How does
‘RadiantFromRails’ sound?
I’m up for getting together with you and Sean on IRC. I’d really
like to hear Sean’s thoughts about how he might approach the issue of
layouts as I haven’t really spent any time thinking about the
implementation yet.
If you get a plugin going, I’d be happy for it to live in the Radiant
SVN repository.
Did you consider wrapping it up as a plugin? Off the top of my head
that seems like it could be the cleanest way to go, but I say that
without seeing how you have it setup now.
What is a basic sketch of the install process as it is?
Some way to embed in a straight Rails app is in my view a key piece
of the puzzle that is Radiant’s future. I have frequent applications
now that would use Radiant in this embedded way if an easy and
unobtrusive way to do so was already established.
So as for going in the Radiant SVN I think it belongs there and I’m
willing to pitch-in on the development effort if you want/need that.
There are “in development” pieces in there already, so I think it’s a
fine place for it. – But that just “like my opinion, dude”.
On May 30, 2007, at 2:01 PM, Mario T. Lanza wrote:
I’m also very interested in allowing Rails pages to leverage Radiant
layouts, and that is the next thing I plan to work on.
I find this is a very natural means of doing just what I have been
attempting to do all along. The only piece that I am missing is the
ability to take advantage of Radiant from the Rails side, which
apparently is a much sought-after piece that is now in the works.
I also wonder if the ability to take advantage of Rails partials in
Pages/Snippets/Parts would be useful to Extension designers. It would
primarily support creating models and tags which produce a kind of
‘widgety’ thing - not necessarily for public/generic consumption, but
for allowing Radiant Extension builders (developers working for CMS
users) to encapsulate something, leveraging the power of Ruby/Rails
while still protecting the CMS user from having the full power of Erb.
But are we going away from the ‘original intent’? There’s fascinating
conversation about the meaning of a piece of literature: is it found
in the text, in the author, or in the reader?
I’m also very interested in allowing Rails pages to leverage Radiant
layouts, and that is the next thing I plan to work on.
I’m very happy to see this project forming. After tossing around many
ideas for integrating custom Rails views within a Radiant site, I’ve
formulated a pattern.
I simply create an extension and build the functionality exactly like
I’m building a Rails app. I modify the routes in the extension
initializer being careful to differentiate between back-end
functionality (for the admin interface) and front-end functionality (for
the sites users). Admin functionality is put in “admin” subfolders just
as is already done with the Radiant admin stuff. For example, here are
the routes I currently use for an in-progress extension that has both
front-end and back-end interfaces.
There models are common, but there is a distinction between the
front-end and back-end controllers and views.
I find this is a very natural means of doing just what I have been
attempting to do all along. The only piece that I am missing is the
ability to take advantage of Radiant from the Rails side, which
apparently is a much sought-after piece that is now in the works.
At this point I am creating Rails layouts that are identical to their
Radiant counterparts. It’s not DRY, but it is workable for the time
being.
I’m eagerly anticipating seeing this extension so I can DRY things up.
Did you consider wrapping it up as a plugin? Off the top of my head
that seems like it could be the cleanest way to go, but I say that
without seeing how you have it setup now.
I think I agree with Loren that Radiant as a plugin is a much nicer way
to go (vs. dropping it in your vendor directory). This way you could
install the pluginized version of Radiant with a simple:
script/plugin install radiant
I’m willing to consider changes to Radiant make this integration easier.
Are you suggesting that I develop from the Radiant SVN repository?
Or are you saying that you’d be happy to host a copy of stable
releases?
Perhaps you could work with Loren on this for the time being. He just
recently joined core and it sounds like you have the same goals. When
you have something ready you guys could drop it in:
I like the idea of being able to install Radiant as a plugin as that
will make it easier to integrate with an existing Rails application.
However, when starting from scratch, the current method seems just as
easy.
As for the RadiantOnRails extension, I’ll release that on RubyForge
for use with 0.6.1 and work with Loren on getting it to a Plugin-ized
version within Radiant SVN repository.
Loren, congrats on the promotion to Radiant Core team member!
It looks like we’re both looking for the same goals out of this
project. The number one feature for us is to reuse the Radiant
layouts to keep that DRY. And that’s where this project will be
going next.
As for the rails portion of the site, the other thing this extension
allows for, is to be able to use the traditional RAILS_ROOT/app/
[controllers|helpers|models|views] folders instead of burying
everything into /vendor/extensions. I think this also helps to
create a cleaner split between Rails and Radiant code and also makes
it easier to integrate Radiant into an existing Rails app.
The RadiantOnRails extension is now live on RubyForge at http:// www.rubyforge.org/projects/radiantonrails. This extension allows for
Radiant to co-exist with a Rails application. You can checkout the
code with the following command:
The RadiantOnRails extension is now live on RubyForge at http:// www.rubyforge.org/projects/radiantonrails. This extension allows for
Radiant to co-exist with a Rails application. You can checkout the
code with the following command:
I already have a Rails app and would like to retrofit it with Radiant
using this extension. How would the process differ from starting with a
Radiant app and building it out into a Rails app?
Read through the Readme in the extension now posted on RubyForge (see
Matt’s original post for address, etc) and you’ll find that the
“installation” is very straight forward and will be the same whether
it’s with a fresh Rails app or an existing one.
