# Radiant integration with another Rails app? **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [May 28, 2007, 6:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304 "2007-05-28T18:04:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2007, 6:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/1 "2007-05-28T18:04:41Z")
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: 1. Routes… I can load my app’s routes first I essentially override everything but the final Radiant default “page not found” route. 2. 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…) 3. 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? Anybody doing any of this yet? Thanks, Loren > **[Resume - Loren Johnson](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WfJomBItrSA281MMFbYpavEKLMkQAfG9pz0or0X5lBU/edit?usp=sharing)** > > LOREN JOHNSON 575-779-9996 | lorenjohnson@gmail.com | github.com/lorenjohnson | linkedin.com/in/johnsonloren EXPERIENCE Senior Software Engineer April 2020 - Current Hylo.com – Terrans Collective Working full stack in Node, GraphQL, React, and... ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2007, 6:14pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/2 "2007-05-28T18:14:42Z")
Hi Loren, Nice to talk to you again! 😉 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. Thanks, Matt ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2007, 6:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/3 "2007-05-28T18:26:44Z")
Hey Matt, 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! Loren ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2007, 7:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/4 "2007-05-28T19:40:53Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2007, 6:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/5 "2007-05-28T18:35:44Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 7:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/6 "2007-05-30T07:15:24Z")
Matt, RadiantFromRails sounds good to me. 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. Loren ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 7:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/7 "2007-05-30T07:44:26Z")
Francesco, It will help if you can post the code snippet with the nested \ **Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 5:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/8 "2007-05-30T17:17:25Z") Matt Parrish wrote: > 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. – John L. [http://wiseheartdesign.com](http://wiseheartdesign.com) ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 6:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/9 "2007-05-30T18:55:59Z")
John, 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? Also, the name I settled on was Radiant on Rails and it is a Radiant Extension. Thanks, Matt ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 7:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/10 "2007-05-30T19:38:05Z")
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”. 🙂 Loren ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 9:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/11 "2007-05-30T21:59:18Z")
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? ``` adam ``` ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 8:01pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/12 "2007-05-30T20:01:08Z")
> 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. define\_routes do |map| #back-end interfaces map.admin\_event ‘admin/event/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘admin/event’ map.admin\_offering ‘admin/offering/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘admin/offering’ #front-end interfaces map.offering ‘offering/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘offering’ map.event ‘event/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘event’ map.registration ‘registration/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘registration’ map.invitation ‘invitation/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘invitation’ map.evite ‘evite/:action/:id’, :controller =\> ‘invitation’ end 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. Mario ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 10:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/13 "2007-05-30T22:50:34Z")
Loren J. wrote: > 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: [http://dev.radiantcms.org/svn/radiant/trunk/plugins/radiant/](http://dev.radiantcms.org/svn/radiant/trunk/plugins/radiant/) I’d suggest that the plugin would have the following directory structure: plugins/ radiant/ init.rb lib/ vendor/ radiant/ \<\<\< an svn:external to trunk/radiant All of this talk makes me think that we need to move all of the Radiant models into the the top level Radiant module to avoid namespace collisions. – John L. [http://wiseheartdesign.com](http://wiseheartdesign.com) ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 10:58pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/14 "2007-05-30T22:58:35Z")
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! 🙂 Matt Parrish [http://www.pearware.org](http://www.pearware.org) ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 30, 2007, 10:07pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/15 "2007-05-30T22:07:19Z")
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. Matt Parrish [http://www.pearware.org](http://www.pearware.org) ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 7:15pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/16 "2007-05-31T19:15:48Z")
The RadiantOnRails extension is now live on RubyForge at http:// [www.rubyforge.org/projects/radiantonrails](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: svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/radiantonrails/trunk Or, to install the extension, follow the instructions from the Radiant website ([http://dev.radiantcms.org/radiant/wiki/Extensions](http://dev.radiantcms.org/radiant/wiki/Extensions)) using the name ‘radiant\_on\_rails’ for the extension\_name. Matt Parrish [http://www.pearware.org](http://www.pearware.org) ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 6:56am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/17 "2007-06-01T06:56:51Z")
Matt Parrish wrote: > The RadiantOnRails extension is now live on RubyForge at http:// > [www.rubyforge.org/projects/radiantonrails](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: > > svn checkout svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/radiantonrails/trunk > > Or, to install the extension, follow the instructions from the > Radiant website ([http://dev.radiantcms.org/radiant/wiki/Extensions](http://dev.radiantcms.org/radiant/wiki/Extensions)) > using the name ‘radiant\_on\_rails’ for the extension\_name. > > Matt Parrish > [http://www.pearware.org](http://www.pearware.org) 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? ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 9:35am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/18 "2007-06-01T09:35:14Z")
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. Give it a shot… ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [May 31, 2007, 7:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/19 "2007-05-31T19:34:50Z")
On May 31, 2007, at 1:14 PM, Matt Parrish wrote: > radiant\_on\_rails Excellent. aiwilliams ---
**Author:** ![lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/l/b5a626/32.png) [@lorenjohnson](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/lorenjohnson)\ **Post date:** [June 1, 2007, 1:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/20 "2007-06-01T13:25:48Z")
You’re absolutely right, sorry I hadn’t looked closely enough. You could gem install Radiant and generate an instance and then merge the necessary bits from the environment.rb it generates into your existing app. If I get a chance I’ll try and determine what those necessary bits are later today and email back what I learn. Loren [Next page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304.md?page=2)