How can I use Radiant to structure content

I want to be able to do the following:

  1. Create a view template in Radiant (e.g., Products)
  2. Allow an administrator to input, using a standard form (not
    necessarily validated) the various product fields (e.g., Product Name,
    SKU, Price, Description), attach images, etc…
  3. Allow an administrator to add stories about a product under a
    category “Stories” so that when someone visits the Products page they
    can see the product stories.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to make it so that when an administrator
adds a new product, the Stories sub category for that product is
automatically defined. Is there a standard way to do something like
this using Radiant, or should I be expecting to make lots of
modifications to the CMS?

Thank you in advance for any help or advice you can offer.

J.Brandhorst

Sounds like a really simple Rails application, but the changes needed to
make Radiant support that might be more than you want to tackle. If you
want assistance with building a Rails application, we can point you to a
bunch of resources.

That said, if your application requires a lot of content management
outside the scope of this product thing, a custom extension or
RadiantOnRails may be the best solution.

Sean

Sounds like a really simple Rails application

Yes, but I need content management for a number of content types outside
of the scope of the Product example. I’m beginning to think that it may
be easier just to build a custom CMS from scratch that is tailored for
my purposes rather than trying to adapt RadiantCMS to fit my particular
requirements.

RadiantOnRails

Thanks. Do you know of any open source projects using RadiantOnRails
with Radiant that I could reference?

On Jun 12, 2007, at 11:45 AM, www-data wrote:

I’m beginning to think that it may
be easier just to build a custom CMS from scratch that is tailored for
my purposes rather than trying to adapt RadiantCMS to fit my
particular
requirements.

you may also want to look at the comatose plugin. comatose handles
basic cms framework for a standard rails app.

Oliver B. wrote:

www-data wrote:

Sounds like a really simple Rails application

Yes, but I need content management for a number of content types outside
of the scope of the Product example. I’m beginning to think that it may
be easier just to build a custom CMS from scratch that is tailored for
my purposes rather than trying to adapt RadiantCMS to fit my particular
requirements.

I maintain a modified version of Radiant (called Shiny) that supports
arbitrary models/types as content, like an image, a form, etc. or a
product in your case. It maintains all of Radiant’s features but allows
you to move away from pages when you do not need them. Maybe it is
similar to what you are looking for. You can check it out at
http://hytek.org/shiny/.

Cheers,
Oliver

Thanks Oliver. Your Shiny mod looks like it might be what I’m looking
for. Do you have any open sourced example sites using Shiny? I’ll be
reading your blog and scanning your source in the meantime.

www-data wrote:

Sounds like a really simple Rails application

Yes, but I need content management for a number of content types outside
of the scope of the Product example. I’m beginning to think that it may
be easier just to build a custom CMS from scratch that is tailored for
my purposes rather than trying to adapt RadiantCMS to fit my particular
requirements.

I maintain a modified version of Radiant (called Shiny) that supports
arbitrary models/types as content, like an image, a form, etc. or a
product in your case. It maintains all of Radiant’s features but allows
you to move away from pages when you do not need them. Maybe it is
similar to what you are looking for. You can check it out at
http://hytek.org/shiny/.

Cheers,
Oliver

www-data wrote:

Thanks Oliver. Your Shiny mod looks like it might be what I’m looking
for. Do you have any open sourced example sites using Shiny?

Other than my blog nothing else at the moment unfortunately. I am,
however, working on two other sites right now.

I also used to have a commenting facility on my blog as another example
of a custom content type. It was really simple and unfortunately got
immediately spammed so I turned it off until I implement some sort of
filter.

With respect to the software design each content model is primarily
treated as hierarchically organized content, just like pages, images,
but at the same time a traditional relational association between them
should be possible as well. For example like “Store” has many “Products”
while “Products” are also content organized hierarchical in folders. I
have not tested that very much, but one of my extensions does something
similar with meta tags.

Please let me know if you are interested or have any questions.

Cheers,
Oliver

Oliver B. wrote:

www-data wrote:

Thanks Oliver. Your Shiny mod looks like it might be what I’m looking
for. Do you have any open sourced example sites using Shiny?

Other than my blog nothing else at the moment unfortunately. I am,
however, working on two other sites right now.

I also used to have a commenting facility on my blog as another example
of a custom content type. It was really simple and unfortunately got
immediately spammed so I turned it off until I implement some sort of
filter.

With respect to the software design each content model is primarily
treated as hierarchically organized content, just like pages, images,
but at the same time a traditional relational association between them
should be possible as well. For example like “Store” has many “Products”
while “Products” are also content organized hierarchical in folders. I
have not tested that very much, but one of my extensions does something
similar with meta tags.

Please let me know if you are interested or have any questions.

Cheers,
Oliver

Do you have a public svn for your blog source?

What’s your eventual direction for Shiny? Could this eventually be made
to be an extension of Radiant?

When I started looking for Rails CMSs, I was hoping to find something
like Drupal. Maybe your CMS will help bridge the gap.

On 12/06/07 05:01 PM, www-data was heard to say:

Do you have a public svn for your blog source?

The code base of the blog is what is in the Shiny SVN
(http://hytek.org/shiny/svn/shiny/trunk/). The relevant Radius code is
the same as for any stock Radiant version and the additions are
straight forward.

What’s your eventual direction for Shiny? Could this eventually be made
to be an extension of Radiant?

I don’t want to interfere too much with the Radiant development,
though I am still optimistic that some of the ideas will eventually
make it into Radiant. A problem with that is that I am a slacker and
too lazy to write proper unit tests.

At the moment I don’t consider Shiny as a fork but more as a branch of
Radiant. However, I am also not planning to turn Shiny into an
extension for Radiant. At least not at the moment. Radiant development
is not very fast, such that I can keep up with merging changes into
Shiny.

I have thought before about turning it into an extension, but it goes
fairly deep into the internals of Radiant, such that an extension
would in fact turn around most of the Radiant code and change
Radiant’s default database schema. This, I think, would not be a good
idea.

Alternatively, it could be turned into an extension parallel to
Radiant’s default content model. That way it would setup it’s own
tables etc. and attempt to disable Radiant’s page implementation.

When I started looking for Rails CMSs, I was hoping to find something
like Drupal. Maybe your CMS will help bridge the gap.

Maybe, though I get the shivers hearing that (for various reasons).

Cheers,
Oliver