This is not intended as a flame or to cause controversy, please don’t
take it as such.
I just recommended a customer to adopt Typo3 instead of Radiant CMS,
why?
- Mailer Behaviour is shaky at best.
- Print page to PDF/PS/CSV is not even completely supported by Rails.
- User roles.
Those were three of the most important things that they told me they
needed. They’re a small-ish (~15 people) company and are not planning
in having huge traffic on their site or anything. However, I had to
recommend the adoption of a CMS that is probably an overkill for what
they need, but with Radiant and its extensions being in such a
“puerile” stage, it’s too much risk telling them to adopt it.
The point I’m trying to drive home is that all of us that are in some
way or another involved in the development of Radiant (whether the
core, extensions, documentation, etc.) need to ramp up development of
Radiant if we really want to make it a production-grade CMS. I believe
for what I’ve read as of late that a whole lot of people is interested
in helping out and I sense the time is ripe for John and whoever else
leads Radiant to “manage” the momentum built up to help get this baby
out the door.
Sorry for soapboxing, but in closing I must echo the thoughts of a
list contributor who said something to the effect that if a project
stagnates for too long, it eventually fades away.
That’s cool, I think it would help. I can wait because I’m busy working
(and
probably way over my head!) trying to incorporate patches from ticket
199 into
mental. Not a complaint, it’s kind of fun coming from Java to
Ruby/Rails/Radiant.
Quoting Sean C. [email protected]:
Sean,
I love how you dismiss genuine claims. Am sure, because of posts in
this list that several other people feel the same way I do. But
whatever, it’s your prerogative to keep thinking otherwise.
Todd,
Regarding the Mailer behavior/extension, I have the code at work, but
unfortunately our SVN is behind a firewall. I’ll try to get it today,
but it may have to wait until Tuesday.
Sean
Flamebait. RadiantUsers wiki page. PDI. That is all.
Just to throw my $.02 in, I agree with most of what Ruben says,
especially with regards to MailerBehavior.
I’ve spent atleast 10 hours the last week and a half between testing,
talking to my host, searching for the little bit of documentation that
is out there, etc trying to figure out how to get it working and I
just can’t get anything going there, nor can I figure what’s actually
wrong with it.
I also agree that user roles and the publishing system needs to be
improved. I’m not talking about a total re-design but it would be nice
to be able to change a page, view some sort of “draft” before it gets
published, and then publish it if it was ok. Also, versioned pages
would be VERY nice, and I wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to
implement with acts_as_versioned, but I’ve never tried.
And then there is the documentation, which I plan to help with as soon
as I get my site launched.
I feel like Radiant is right on the edge of being ready, and hopefully
the next version (mental?!?) will be just enough to push it to fully
ready.
-BJ Clark
Ok, ok. My message wasn’t entirely fair. At first I started writing a
Slashdot-ish rebuttal, but got tired of reading my own ugly words.
Still, Radiant doesn’t claim to be what it’s not – don’t use a wrench
to drive in nails. Too many CMSs try to be everything to everyone and
Radiant doesn’t, which is why I love it.
Sean
BJ Clark wrote:
Just to throw my $.02 in, I agree with most of what Ruben says,
especially with regards to MailerBehavior.
The mailer behavior seems to have outlived it’s usefulness. I definitely
agree that we need to do something better.
I also agree that user roles and the publishing system needs to be
improved. I’m not talking about a total re-design but it would be nice
to be able to change a page, view some sort of “draft” before it gets
published, and then publish it if it was ok. Also, versioned pages
would be VERY nice, and I wouldn’t think it would be that difficult to
implement with acts_as_versioned, but I’ve never tried.
Send in the patches.
And then there is the documentation, which I plan to help with as soon
as I get my site launched.
That would be awesome.
–
John
Ruben D. Orduz wrote:
- Mailer Behaviour is shaky at best.
Sean C. has been working on a replacement extension for the mailer
behavior. I’m hoping that he will be gracious enough to allow us to
eventually pull it into the official extensions repository. It seems a
lot of people have had trouble with the mailer behavior and I agree that
we need a better supported solution.
- Print page to PDF/PS/CSV is not even completely supported by Rails.
This would probably be a lot of work. I’d suggest you try to come up
with something that would function well as an extension.
I’m open to patches that make it easy for people to swap in their own
user management/permissions system. Everyone and their uncle seems to
have an opinion about how this should be done.
Sorry for soapboxing, but in closing I must echo the thoughts of a
list contributor who said something to the effect that if a project
stagnates for too long, it eventually fades away.
I have no intention of seeing Radiant stagnate and fade away, but I do
have a living to make. 
Part of the reason things have been slow is
that we are still bringing core developers up to speed on the current
code base and the direction of the project. I’m adding developers as I
can, but it takes time.
Thanks for helping out with the documentation. Your work there is
appreciated.
–
John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com
In my limited time here, I’m noticing many mailer behavior
questions/problems.
Can we move things forward by producing a mailer extension? Sean, I
think
you’ve mentioned writing one or I can give it shot and post it up for
review.
Ruben, I think your intentions are good. Can you describe more about
what you
need in:
- Print page to PDF/PS/CSV is not even completely supported by Rails.
- User roles
or point to the previous post(s) that describes it more detail?
Todd
Quoting Sean C. [email protected]:
Hey guys,
@John, I totally understand because I myself only get to tinker with
Rails/Radiant for one or two hours a day max (living to make, son &
wife at home). Just wanted to bring up attention to some outstanding
issues that I think need to be worked on. I, for one, will keep
working on user roles and documentation in general.
It would be cool if BJ can hack something out for the act_as_versioned
and maybe the page-caching-retooling bloke (am terribly sorry guy,
totally forgot your name) can help getting that working.
I also totally understand the complexity of giving the option to
download pages as PDF/PS/CSV(if it’s a data-intensive page)…just
something someone could take a stab at.