On 30-Jan-09, at 7:32 PM, N. Turnage wrote:
Adam van den Hoven wrote:
The thread on what "standard" plugins do people use as well the
"Oops I deleted the contest2 content" thread got me thinking that
it would be great if someone wrote a tutorial to the effect of,
"How to customize your Radiant command".
Usually I start 90% of my radiant sites by installing the same
extensions; they fit into the way I like to do my work. I am also
inherently lazy so I'd rather put a lot of work in now to prevent
having to do that work over and over again later (I'm told that's
not actually lazy, but I'm not convinced).
Things I would like know how to do:
1) add my own "default" plugins to the created site
2) add my own initial site templates (or force a single initial
setup)
3) take production database parameters from the command line (I
tend to follow the same pattern since most of my sites are on
dreamhost)
4) save the results in Git (either in my own repository on
Dreamhost or in GitHub)
5) update my custom radiant with the lastest changes (either
plugins or radiant itself) half a year from now. .
I like the idea of making the radiant command do things the way I
like it but (5) is critical if I don't want to fall behind. I also
want to control which "versions" I see of any of these so that I
don't get hosed when version 0.8 comes out and now half my
extensions won't work with 0.7.9
Sorry, dude, but that wouldn't work that way because of the nature
of open source. Not everybody maintains their extensions with up to
the minute changes for Radiant edge, there is no standard way for
managing Radiant projects in git, extensions aren't always in git
repos and the extensions are rarely tagged for which which commits
work with which Radiant versions. Not to mention that some people
prefer to use the multi_site extension for their Radiant projects
which brings a whole other set of complications. Also, Dreamhost
hosting for Radiant projects presents a further set of complications
that someone like myself doesn't encounter because I use Rails
Playground instead.
The only way that it might be possible for your suggestion to work
is for RadiantMachine to get up and running and have it become the
standard way of building and hosting Radiant apps. It would need to
be kind of like Wordpress where they have a large number of sites
that are hosted by the mothership, but if people so desire they can
build and run a Wordpress site on their own servers. What do you
think, Sean, you're not busy, eh? Feel like becoming a millionaire?
All you need is some venture capital.
That's exactly my point, actually.
Let me back up a few points because I seem to be starting from a
different point of view than most sane rational folk ;)
According to the website, "Radiant is a no-fluff, open source content
management system designed for small teams." Now there are two ways to
look at that. One category of "small teams" will be the sort where, "I
have to build a website for my company/team/church/self and look this
is good". A lot of people using it once, maybe twice.
The other category is what I do. I build websites for companies. I
have used content management systems for almost a decade now, starting
with a small company where we built a CMS for news broadcasters, since
then I've been using Interwoven Teamsite for my "real" work. Radiant
is my platform of choice for my moonlighting work.
So I'm going to be building a lot of sites from one instance of the
radiant gem. Everytime I build a site, I'm going to start exactly the
same way (following some variation on my own tutorial on the subject: http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Install_Dreamhost_Using_SSH)
. Not very DRY.
As you said, not everyone keeps their extension up to date with the
edge. Also, not everyone tags their extensions so that its easy to get
the "right" version of an extension to work with my version of
radiant. One solution is to fork those into my own repository so I
always have the right one.
Like I said, I do the same things time and again to start off. So what
i want to do is have all those things done for me automatically. Now I
could write a script to do all this but it seems more natural to
create my default starting site once put it in to my repository and
have the radiant command create my starting site, not the current
default.
This customized radiant would live in my own repository and would be
useful only to me. But since I'll use it several times a month, that's
ok. Plus since I'm keeping it under version control, I've effectively
put my business process under version control too. I know that what I
do will be repeatable and if I need to switch computers or bring on a
partner, we can continue to use the same.
Seriously, though, I think Radiant is just fine as it is. Well, it
would be nice to have those "blogging" features alluded to for 7.1
(?). Then it would be perfect. Well, it would be great if...
Absolutely. I'm talking about tailoring it for MY needs and then
documenting how I did it so that others can, if they like, do the
same. I don't want to change Radiant, I wan't to change how I use it.
Its like taking a suit off the rack and asking a tailor to adjust the
fit (only I'm the tailor too).
Adam
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