Mario Lanza wrote: > Will, > > You really are asking hundred-dollar questions, some of which are the > same ones I've been asking. I've been hearing that Radiant is a CMS and > that it is primarily geared toward serving up content. That's true. > However, like you, I have the need to integrate other "pages" into my > site that interface with the user (allowing him to logon, complete a > form, do data entry, etc.). Basically, what you're wanting is a hybrid. > You want to capitalize on what Radiant does well and interject in a few > areas with what Rails does well. At least, that's my goal. > > I've really toiled over this wondering what would be the best practice. > Making loose use of the 80:20 rule, 80% of my needs are met by Radiant > in excellent fashion. However, 20% of my needs are not. They are, > however, met by Rails which--go figure--just so happens to be what > Radiant was built on! This naturally has me asking: If Rails is right > there under the hood, how come I can't *easily* leverage it for my > custom pages? Additionally, why do I have to sacrifice one for the > other. Can't I have "Radiant on Rails" and make use of both? I haven't > found the obvious answer at this point, though I would be all too happy > to hear what others are doing. Or even if this is a typical problem, > which, perhaps, it isn't. > > Here's what I ultimately decided to do. It may not be the best choice, > but it's what came to mind. First, I started with Radiant as content > management is the core of my particular site. Now, I am getting ready > to transition into the next phase, where I will plug into the site the > user-interactive pages. Basically, I'm going to write a separate Rails > application that accesses the same Radiant database. (I'm using the > same database since it already has the app-specific tables for which I > added back-end interfaces into Radiant.) I'm going to overlay the Rails > app on top of the Radiant site. That is, I'm going to (attempt to) use > Apache mod_rewrite to properly dispatch incoming URLs to the right > application: RadiantCMS or CustomRailsApp. I'm going to attempt to make > the pages in the CustomRailsApp look like the pages found in Radiant. > I'm going to attempt to disguise the URLs so that the custom pages look > like they are part of the same Radiant site. The idea is to make these > two separate apps (each running on their own mongrels) appear seamlessly > integrated. > > I don't feel good about this. It feels like a kludge. What I'd like to > do is write extensions--just like those I'm already starting to write on > the back end--for the front end. I'd like to be able to do this within > the context of a Radiant page so that I can take advantage of Radiant's > offerings (snippets, custom tags, layouts, etc.) and Rail's offerings > (simplified CRUD). If I were a Ruby/Rails veteran I'd develop just this > sort of functionality/feature. Unfortunately, I'm still relatively > green and so I'm looking at more basic alternatives. > > It's been recommended that I create custom tags to accomplish some of > this. I don't like the idea. Why am I writing custom tags to do > something that Rails already knows how to do? Writing custom tags to > accomplish Rails CRUD operations feels ludicrous. I feel like that > would be learning Chinese to tell an Chinese-English interpreter to tell > my English speaking friend something that I could just tell him myself. > > I do wish to make it clear: I think Radiant is superb. I love Radius, > the simplicity of page parts, and its extensibility. It's just inches > away from being incredible. It's a matter of lessening the division > between itself and Rails so that hybrid sites won't be such a difficult > matter. > > If you run into any good ideas, I'd like to hear them. Who knows, maybe > "front-end extensions" won't be far off... :) > > Respectfully, > Mario T. Lanza > >
Mario, I think there are at least a few of us who are thinking the same way. I haven't delved into Radiant much as yet, so I'm not yet sure that it's very difficult to integrate other Rails apps. Cheers Mohit. _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: [email protected] Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
