I just want to second this, the extensions are very well thought out and pretty easy to use even in their very raw state. I have a very simple assets management system (based on acts_as_attachment) that took maybe a few hours to set up. Most of that was making sure that the views integrated nicely into Radiant. 

I found another small gotcha with the migrations. If you have more than one extension, you do have to make sure that the migrations are properly numbered. 2 "No. !" doesn't work. And the rake task provides no feedback, I have gotten used to the new Rake  task telling me what it is doing. Not a biggie, but it would be nice. 

All in all, this is a really great addition to Radiant and vastly increases its value, at least to me. I can't wait until an official release.

One sort of funny note: I tried to add tagging to Radiant while I was at it. I used the acts_as_taggable plugin (not the Gem) from DHH and only had to add one line to the Page model and one line in the control, plus a very small change in the views. It worked great. Except that it totally broke the Radius tagging system and the front end rendered nothing. 

Just for fun and because I had just watched the original Battlestar Galactica with it's robotic "Daggits", I renamed the plugin to "acts_as_daggable", changed all the instances of "tag" to "dag" and the thing works. Really well, actually. So adding tagging to Radiant should be very easy, but we do have to watch our namespaces. 

Keith Bingman




On Nov 13, 2006, at 7:59 PM, Loren Johnson wrote:


I've been playing with the Mental branch this weekend to test-out the  
work being done on the new Radiant Extensions concept. I thought I  
just put down a quick narrative of my experience with it to give  
those who've not had a chance to check it out recently a preview of  
what's to come. There is some work still to do here, but as far as I  
can see a lot of work has been done in the last few weeks.


Everything is working pretty well... I can generate and extension  
"script/generate extension calendar" and modify the necessary lines  
in the extension activate method to make it show-up as an admin tab.  
Then I was able to dump a bunch of pre-existing models and migrations  
from the Calendar application I want to integrate with ease.

Understanding that this is very much a work in progress, I did want  
to make one note of interest:

When I created the Calendar extension and then ran my migrations I  
found out quickly that it doesn't work well to have a model named the  
same as the Extension (I had a Calendar model as well). I renamed my  
Calendar model, reversed the migrations by hand and everything  
migrated up fine the second time around.

Then in my calendar controller I dumped a scaffold :event_calendar  
and voila! I had a nifty interface for adding and removing calendars  
right within Radiant admin.

I know I for one see the maturation of these extensions as an  
important turning-point for Radiant as a project.

IMHO this robust and Rails friendly way of extending Radiant is key  
to allowing it to remain spartan. Though I might still prefer the CMS  
to be the plugin a la Comatose, this level (and method) of  
extensibility will mean the best of both worlds for most of those who  
just have CMS needs + a little something else.



So, John, with crystal ball in hand, what do you see as a likely  
timeframe for an official release which includes both Extensions and  
Page Types?




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