# 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:** 2
**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, 10:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/21 "2007-06-01T10:21:44Z")
Loren J. wrote: > 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… I read the README before posting, but it seemed to me like it was explaining how to modify an existing Radiant app, rather than an existing Rails app: ================================================== 1. Edit RAILS\_ROOT/config/environment.rb and change the following line config.view\_path = File.join(RADIANT\_ROOT, ‘app’, ‘views’) to # config.view\_paths \<\< File.join(RAILS\_ROOT, ‘app’, ‘views’) config.view\_paths \<\< File.join(RADIANT\_ROOT, ‘app’, ‘views’) The environment.rb file (RAILS\_ROOT/config/environment.rb) in a stock Rails app wouldn’t have any mention of ‘RADIANT\_ROOT’ Am I misunderstanding the directions? ---
**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, 3:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/22 "2007-06-01T15:34:04Z")
Loren, Yes, it’s not quite straightforward at the moment to retrofit an existing Rails app. These are the exact issues that need to be worked out for the plugin version of Radiant, though. So, anything you figure out should be applicable there. I’m guessing that there might be a few minor changes to the Radiant code to get things working cleanly in instance, gem and plugin modes. 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 2, 2007, 3:17am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/23 "2007-06-02T03:17:03Z")
Loren J. wrote: > 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 So is the goal at this point to make it possible to install Radiant as a plugin with the folder structure that John laid out? plugins/ radiant/ init.rb lib/ vendor/ radiant/ \<\<\< an svn:external to trunk/radiant ---
**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 2, 2007, 3:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/24 "2007-06-02T15:39:45Z")
Yes, it seems to me like that is the goal. Currently, Radiant takes control of the files in config/ to do its initialization. It seems like we would want to keep the Rails files as is, and do the initialization in plugins/radiant/init.rb. I haven’t looked at it yet, but I’m guessing there will be a few challenges to getting this to work properly. One challenge I immediately see is getting Radiant’s routes to coordinate with the Rails ones in config/routes.rb. 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 2, 2007, 3:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/25 "2007-06-02T15:47:47Z")
Oh, I guess I didn’t realize that vendor/radiant would be any easier than vendor/plugins/radiant. How would that change things? If it’s in vendor/radiant, don’t we have to get into config/environment.rb or config/boot.rb to load radiant, whereas if it was in vendor/plugins/ radiant, then Rails would automatically start initializing it (although I’m not sure at what part of the process it would do that)? 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:** [June 2, 2007, 3:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/26 "2007-06-02T15:42:46Z")
Why not keep Radiant in vendor/radiant? Then the startup scripts would require less modification. Sean ---
**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 2, 2007, 3:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/27 "2007-06-02T15:53:48Z")
The stock environment.rb and boot.rb will load Radiant from vendor/radiant automatically. The challenge of course, would be loading the proper routes and adding the traditional app directories to the load path. I think you guys already have that, no? The other issue is that Radiant radically alters the bootup process and needs to do so for the purpose of loading extensions. It’s my guess that if you put it in vendor/plugins/radiant, things are going to be much harder to hook up. Sean ---
**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 2, 2007, 4:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/28 "2007-06-02T16:13:50Z")
Okay, cool. As for the routes, my extension currently has the user modify config/routes.rb a bit since /vendor/radiant/config/routes.rb calls the Rails route initialization. If we could change it so that Radiant hooks into that process differently, then the developer can write config/routes.rb as is done traditionally. It doesn’t look like the Rails guys have given an easy way to hook into that process, although it could easily be a one line call to Radiant to load its routes at the end of the ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw { | map| } block. However Radiant’s /vendor/radiant/config/routes.rb would need to change slightly to be like how extensions define routes. Here’s the change I see. Instead of how Radiant currently does config/routes.rb and vendor/radiant/config/routes.rb as load File.join(RADIANT\_ROOT, “config”, “routes.rb”) and ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| # Admin Routes map.with\_options(:controller =\> ‘admin/welcome’) do |welcome| … end respectively. It could look like this: ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map| # Place for Rails Routes map.with\_options(:controller =\> ‘admin/welcome’) do |welcome| … RadiantRoutes.define\_routes(map) end and class RadiantRoutes def self.define\_routes(map) # Admin Routes map.with\_options(:controller =\> ‘admin/welcome’) do |welcome| … end end What do you think about making a change like that? We would just need to make sure that config/routes.rb can see the RadiantRoutes class. It wouldn’t affect the current Radiant usage, but would allow for developers to work with config/routes.rb like normal. The RadiantOnRails extension is like the first solution, except that I have the user create a class RailsRoutes with a define\_routes method that my extension calls. I think the second solution here would be preferred. 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 2, 2007, 5:26pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/29 "2007-06-02T17:26:05Z")
Yes, that’s basically what my extension is doing. But it does require a slight change to config/routes.rb, because vendor/radiant/ config/routes.rb is where the ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw { |map| } block is. And I don’t think we can have that there and in config/routes.rb 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 2, 2007, 5:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/30 "2007-06-02T17:40:05Z")
Yeah, that’s why I was saying perhaps a parse-and-eval method might work: 1. Load the “#{RAILS\_ROOT}/config/routes.rb” file as text. 2. Find and strip out the lines that contain the beginning and end of the block. 3. eval the file in the local context of the define\_routes block. Not elegant, I know, but effective. Sean ---
**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 2, 2007, 5:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/31 "2007-06-02T17:47:08Z")
Yeah, that might work, but eeewwww! 🙂 Wouldn’t it be better to modify Radiant a bit to have it be clean? It’s really a fairly non-invasive change to Radiant. ---
**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 2, 2007, 5:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/32 "2007-06-02T17:53:10Z")
Yeah, I was also thinking of the distribution issue… how do you make it relatively painless to use. Here’s another option – I imagine that the project’s lib/ directory will be searched before the RADIANT\_ROOT/lib directory, so you might be able to replace the Radiant::Initializer class in there with modifications. This should give you the hooks you need. Maybe we should continue this discussion in the IRC channel? We’re getting very back-and-forth. Sean ---
**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 2, 2007, 5:57pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/33 "2007-06-02T17:57:48Z")
Sean C. wrote: > The stock environment.rb and boot.rb will load Radiant from > vendor/radiant automatically. You mean the stock environment.rb and boot.rb from a Radiant app, right? Isn’t the idea to make RadiantOnRails act like a normal Rails plugin that can simply be installed from the root of a Rails app with ‘script/plugin install radiant\_on\_rails’? I believe this is why John laid out the folder structure the way he did: John W. Long wrote: > plugins/ > radiant/ > init.rb > lib/ > vendor/ > radiant/ \<\<\< an svn:external to trunk/radiant That would be necessary to get auto-loading from a stock Rails app. There seems to be a little bit of confusion in this thread (“Are we adding Rails to a Radiant app, or Radiant to a Rails app?”), but I think this snippet of Loren’s original post should clear things up: Loren J. wrote: > putting Radiant in the vendor directory of an existing > full-scale Rails app and having it play nicely I totally agree with Loren that it would be a much more common scenario to want to retrofit a Rails app with Radiant. I’ve created more than a few Rails apps (primarily e-commerce stores) where the site owner eventually wanted more control over the copy. Update rhtml \>\> check-in > > cap deploy gets quite tedious after a while. Retrofitting the app > > with Radiant (in an unobtrusive way) would have been a great solution. ---
**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 2, 2007, 6:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/34 "2007-06-02T18:05:11Z")
I think Matt and Loren’s cases are more about a tighter integration between Radiant and the host application, including reusing Radiant pages, layouts, and snippets in Rails. If you just want to add some content management to an existing Rails application, there’s always the Comatose plugin, which has been around for a while and is probably better suited to that scenario. Sean ---
**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 2, 2007, 6:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/35 "2007-06-02T18:16:24Z")
Sean C. wrote: > I think Matt and Loren’s cases are more about a tighter integration > between Radiant and the host application, including reusing Radiant > pages, layouts, and snippets in Rails. If you just want to add some > content management to an existing Rails application, there’s always the > Comatose plugin, which has been around for a while and is probably > better suited to that scenario. > > Sean I spent a little bit of time with Comatose this week. It’s a cool project, but a little bit too basic for my needs. I think we would agree that Radiant is—in many ways—an unparalleled CMS. ---
**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 3, 2007, 7:31am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/36 "2007-06-03T07:31:16Z")
Two things from my perspective with regard to what’s been said so far: 1. In my understanding the standard plugin architecture as suggested by John gives us dead-simple Radiant plugin-ability to any forming or existing Rails app. This is probably the primary objective for my cases despite my whining about wanting to reuse my layouts, that and calling snippets / page parts in Rails views is a second priority for me. 2. I don’t think we have to make the choice between “tight integration” of Radiant content into Rails views and simplicity of installation. They are different issues both with their own significant challenges, so it doesn’t make sense to try and achieve both in the same release. So, I think addressing the plugin architecture issues first is good. From that basis we can then work- out integration issues (snippet helpers, layout reuse, etc.) I figure if we go that route we’ll have more people using Radiant as a component of a larger Rails app sooner and therefore more input, effort and ideas being contributed to making the content integration stuff work as well and completely as possible. 1. I’ve used Comatose in a few projects and each of those cases I’d rather have used a plugged-in version of Radiant instead. It’s a great project but I’d sure like to be leveraging my Radiant work and skills when I integrate. This also makes the transition with my clients from “we’ll start with a simple content site” to “now let’s build a custom app” less expense and painful. This is a common enough scenario for me. I’ll put some more time into playing with Radiant installed as a plugin this week and see what trouble I find. Looks like you’ve gotten a good start on the right questions for me Sean and Matt. I’ll report back on how far I get later this week. 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:** [June 3, 2007, 5:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/37 "2007-06-03T17:39:47Z")
Loren J. wrote: > …“we’ll start with a simple content site” to “now let’s > build a custom app” less expense and painful. This is a common enough > scenario for me. I could see this being very common scenario for me as well. I’m moving to a more iterative development process—hard-coded rhtml first phase, then CMS second phase. I agree that the plugin would gain much more exposure and feedback if we initially focused on making this a simple process. Since this is something I immediately need, I am very willing to pitch in. I have to admit I’ve never made a plugin, but I have built about seven production Rails apps. If you point me to the right material, I could do some reading and research this week and get up to speed on plugin development and help out where possible. Of course, if you feel it would be more a burden than a benefit to bring on a plugin noob, that’s ok too. ---
**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 8, 2007, 7:17pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/38 "2007-06-08T19:17:33Z")
Loren J. wrote: > I’ll put some more time into playing with Radiant installed as a > plugin this week and see what trouble I find. Looks like you’ve > gotten a good start on the right questions for me Sean and Matt. I’ll > report back on how far I get later this week. > > Loren Any luck, 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:** [June 9, 2007, 1:10am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/39 "2007-06-09T01:10:38Z")
Jed, Thanks for checking. I actually gave the project several hours this week and made some progress. I had a long conversation with Sean and reviewed with him the issues I’ve ran into so far and the changes big and small that may be required to make it work. Feel free to email me directly and I’ll fill you in and see if we might work together on any part of it. I’m not really ready to publish my “findings” to the entire list quiet yet, though I’d like to do just that shortly… Loren removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid ---
**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 2, 2007, 5:03pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304/40 "2007-06-02T17:03:00Z")
Here’s another option, one you may have considered already. Extension routes are loaded before the Radiant routes and all of this is taken care of by Radiant::Initializer. You could either extend Radiant::Initializer or use the define\_routes block in the extension to load the primary routes.rb. I’m not sure whether you should parse, process, and eval it or some other method, but it is conceivably possible. I think it has to do with generators or rake tasks, but Radiant does something similar to redefine some stock Rails stuff. Sean [Previous page](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiant-integration-with-another-rails-app/105304.md?page=1)