Oliver, I like your thought process. What you are running up against is the fact that the core of radiant does not model the true problem domain. And I continually read here were developers hit this wall.
One of the things that I love about radiant (and rails too, really) is that it focuses on the user. In my mind, the goal should always be to make the user's life simpler - even if this means making the developer's work more difficult. So I agree with John's and Dan's objective to keep the interface simple and intuitive. Let's not over-complicate the thing. No fluff. But does the radiant back-end have to match the UI? No matter what the radiant interface design, HTML and HTTP are what they are. The web specifies HTML pages, images, stylesheets, and more - all organized within directories. Yet the core of radiant, really, only addresses the page (or at least text) part of this spec. The (wise) simplification of UI has lead to a over-simplification of the data model - to the point where the model doesn't match enough of web reality. So newcomers to radiant keep stubbing their toes when they try to use radiant in legitimate but unforeseen ways. Yes, sometimes this is genuine over-complication on the developer's part but many problems would be trivial with a more consistent model. And radiant would grow more gracefully. As I see it, radiant, should model, track and store all the key web elements (in a db or otherwise is only a technical issue) because they are needed to make a site (they are all part of the content being managed). Once the true objects exist within radiant, nothing says that you then can't adjust how and which elements are exposed (like showing only HTML pages in the admin interface) or to add metaphors that make our user's jobs simpler (like page parts). So, Oliver I like your thinking because you see the benefit to making radiant "aware" of all the fundamental web pieces. Now, whether the UI should expose the creation of page types with a combo-box or how simple the admin page should look... that's is a wholly separate issue. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: [email protected] Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
