# RadiantCMS, Maple Leaf Web Project **URL:** \ **Category:** Radiant CMS\ **Created:** [October 27, 2006, 10:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910 "2006-10-27T22:06:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2006, 10:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/1 "2006-10-27T22:06:30Z")
Hello all - I’ve cleared this request/email with John W. Long… ## I’m interested in possibly using Ruby on Rails for a political educational project that I currently manage. Currently the website (Maple Leaf Web [http://www.mapleleafweb.com](http://www.mapleleafweb.com)) is completely static, and it is getting harder and harder to manage the content. I’ve gone through a redesign phase (designing just a few of the pages, so I could get an idea of how the navigation, and subpages would be laid out) [[http://www.mapleleafweb.ca/redesign/index.html](http://www.mapleleafweb.ca/redesign/index.html)], and I am now looking to install a CMS to manage the content. I have extensive experience with WordPress - but I don’t think even a modified version of WordPress would accomplish all the requirements we need. I’ve have also inquired with a couple developers who work with Drupal. However, I’m not convinced that Drupal is up to the task - it’s a powerful CMS, but more oriented towards building online communities that serving feature/backgrounders. I have also been stung by a few Drupal developers who say they can deliver, only to disappoint. I’ve always been intrigued by Rails, particularly after Alistapart was redesigned and employed Ruby on Rails as core of the CMS. I also use FeedDigest a lot, which from what I understand uses Ruby on Rails for some of its front-end. I became aware of RadiantCMS after I was searching for a decent (mature) CMS that used Ruby. However, there seems to be a large gap between existing Ruby on Rails websites and any mature Ruby on Rails CMS. RadiantCMS seems to be heads and shoulders above the other opensource Ruby on Rails CMS. I think Alistapart [[http://alistapart.com](http://alistapart.com)] is fairly close to what we need for Maple Leaf Web (and as far as I know, they use Ruby on Rails), and I’m interested in an opinions about whether this can be accomplished for a non-profit organization and or whether Ruby on Rails is the platform that can accomplish what we need done. I am also impressed at the implementation of RadiantCMS for the Ruby website, [http://www.ruby-lang.org](http://www.ruby-lang.org) - which I think closely resembles what we need for Maple Leaf Web; lots of content, with sidebars pointing the user to additional/related content. Unfortunately, budget is always a concern when dealing with an organization that lives through charity of others. Does developers on this mailing list provide discounts for verifable non-profits looking for development? If not, do any of you know of anyone who would be interested in developing a Ruby on Rails CMS in exchange for a “sponsorship” mention/links on the new design? In the past we’ve provided a link in the footer of each sub-page on the site. We have a great deal of traffic (44,575 Visits, 265,533 page views as of October 25, 2006) and we’re willing to provide some positive exposure to companies/individuals that help. If you require more details of our requirements, please contact me and I’ll forward more information. Thanks in advance for any help that you can provide, Thanks, ## Greg Farries M.A. Project Manager [http://mapleleafweb.com](http://mapleleafweb.com) Phone: 403.329.2286 Fax: 403.382.7148 Email: removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid Canada’s Premier Political Education Website ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2006, 10:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/2 "2006-10-27T22:16:31Z")
Hello Greg, Radiant in my opinion is too young to handle a fully dynamic website with tons of content. I really like Rails and Radiant, but in all honesty Radiant still ways to go to even compete with full-featured CMSs such as Typo3 and Joomla! which are amazingly complete, robust, open source and free. I still find many more willing PHP developers than Ruby/Rails devs…so that’s something you might want to keep in consideration. Also PHP is much, much, much more widely supported by web hosts than Rails is. At the end it’s your decish; however, if I was in your shoes, I’d deploy a php-based CMS for the time being and later on (once Radiant or any other Rails-based CMS matures to such a level) you can make the move. Peace, Ruben ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2006, 10:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/3 "2006-10-27T22:52:36Z")
I disagree with Ruben - the point of Radiant isn’t to mature to be like Drupal, Joomla! or Typo3; the point of Radiant is that it’s mature to exercise restraint. Radiant is for small groups of people to manage a straight forward site. I think it depends on what you want. If you want to have the site feature the articles, Radiant is great for a site like that, (imho) better than Drupal. If you want to add polls, forums, and other community features, you should probably go with Drupal. I’ve been a Drupal user/site configulator for over two years now (including using it for a magazine website, which I’m in the process of moving to Radiant). I’ve found that most of the sites that I’ve worked on would have been / are much better off with Radiant than Drupal. Why? Because Drupal was overkill. I spent most of the time turning off features and dealing with ‘the way it is’ than with the content itself. So if you’re going to keep the forums and polls separate I don’t see why you couldn’t use Radiant. ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2006, 4:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/4 "2006-10-28T04:00:53Z")
Erik, I’m sorry I think I misunderstood Greg’s needs and you might’ve misunderstood (or I didn’t explain myself properly) a little. Radiant right now, in spite of all of its merits it still is in its infancy (performance-, feature- and support-wise). I wouldn’t want Radiant to YAOCMS. It has its own place, use and personality, if you will. However, you must admit that much work still needs to be done to work out the features that it DOES have and some features that would definitely be helpful from the administrative perspective. No, I don’t want Forums, XML aggregators, polls, classifieds, banner rotators, etc. I’d simply would like: - A more graphical (not necessarily WYSIWYG) editor so that those people who write content can enter it themselves w/o needing to know HTML, Textile, Markdown or any other mark-up language. - A roles based content entry…don’t want a casual collaborator to have the same level of access than, say, a developer or an admin or a regular collaborator. - Comments/Feedback system. (which I beleive was mentioned in the presentation @ RubyCon). - Category management. I know some of this can be (relatively) easily implemented, but the fact is that they’re as yet not there. I know the merits (and dismerits) of Drupal, Joomla! and Typo3…I simply suggested them based on my perception that this site was fairly large and highly dynamic. At any rate, the point is that there are already a quadrazillion (an actual number: a four followed by a bizillion zeros) very competnt CMS’s that can even walk your dog and I wouldn’t like Radiant become just one more. However, some added features would enhance the experience of what it does do and what it does best. JMO. Peace, Ruben ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2006, 1:47pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/5 "2006-10-28T13:47:14Z")
Ruben D. Orduz wrote: > - Comments/Feedback system. (which I beleive was mentioned in the > presentation @ RubyCon). It has that already, albeit a somewhat kludgy implementation. Check out Commentable on the wiki under ThirdPartyBehaviors. Sean C. [seancribbs.com](http://seancribbs.com) ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2006, 11:06pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/6 "2006-10-27T23:06:37Z")
Erik M. wrote: > I disagree with Ruben - the point of Radiant isn’t to mature to be > like Drupal, Joomla! or Typo3; the point of Radiant is that it’s > mature to exercise restraint. Radiant is for small groups of people > to manage a straight forward site. Well, in terms of Maple Leaf Web, we have a very small team of writers/editors. Including the following Admin (myself) Senior Editor (4) Managing Editor (1) Content Manager (2) Writers (4) The Senior editors, and writers won’t even need access to the CMS, only myself, the managing editor and the content manager need to be able to add/edit content. So I think this definitely falls into the small team/group class. > I think it depends on what you want. If you want to have the site > feature the articles, Radiant is great for a site like that, (imho) > better than Drupal. If you want to add polls, forums, and other > community features, you should probably go with Drupal. Essentially, all I need the CMS to do is manage the features we produce. The Weblog, Forum, sections will all be controlled by third party software. Weblog will use Wordpress, the forum will be PunBB. > Why? Because Drupal was overkill. I spent most of the time > turning off features and dealing with ‘the way it is’ than with the > content itself. I agree, and this is why I initally looked at using Wordpress. Wordpress is almost what I need, as it doesn’t complicate the process with a bunch of features almost no one uses. ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Farries](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Greg_Farries)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2006, 10:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/radiantcms-maple-leaf-web-project/73910/7 "2006-11-07T10:44:08Z")
Greg, On 28/10/2006, at 6:11 AM, Greg Farries wrote: > > I think it depends on what you want. If you want to have the site > > feature the articles, Radiant is great for a site like that, (imho) > > better than Drupal. If you want to add polls, forums, and other > > community features, you should probably go with Drupal. > > Essentially, all I need the CMS to do is manage the features we > produce. > The Weblog, Forum, sections will all be controlled by third party > software. > Weblog will use Wordpress, the forum will be PunBB. From the design mockups, I see that you want to incorporate the latest info from your BBS and blog? If so, this might be tricky to accomplish with Radiant. > > Why? Because Drupal was overkill. I spent most of the time > > turning off features and dealing with ‘the way it is’ than with the > > content itself. > > I agree, and this is why I initally looked at using Wordpress. > Wordpress is > almost what I need, as it doesn’t complicate the process with a > bunch of > features almost no one uses. Wordpress gets messy when you try to manage a lot of static pages, as pages seem to be an extension of blog-posts, not first-class citizens. And don’t get me started on drupal! 🙂 Bodhi ps. I like the new design mockups a lot, they are very clear and simple.