This feels like a troll, but I'm bored tonight, so here goes nothing: On Jun 26, 2010, at 1:24 PM, mgutz wrote:
> I'm trying to grasp what Radiant CMS is. I went through the demo. My > initial impression is that Radiant a page management system more > concerned with structure than content. I'm at a loss to figure out what that statement means. The idea of "snippets" in Radiant allows a great deal of flexibility in building templates, and in structuring content at a sub-page level. > In contrast, a CMS like Drupal > is focused on content. That is the basic unit of management is content > be it an artricle, product, blog entry, video clip, a recipe ... Install one of the blog examples and take a closer look. The basic unit of management in there is the article. I think you're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Of course there's a page-centric appearance. After all, it, like WordPress or Drupal, assembles a complete page before sending it to a browser, every single time. It's convenient to talk about things in terms of pages, because of that. But plugins carry their own weight, snippets modularize the formatting of bits of content, single content articles are stored in the db, not entire pages. All of this is sub-page level of detail. > I wonder if any Ruby CMS will ever reach the status of Drupal because of > the difference in approach. That is not to say Drupal is the ultimate > CMS. It certainly isn't. But even so, you're comparing a pre-release version of a product (note Radiant isn't yet at release 1.0) with a product that saw release 1.0 almost a decade ago. Of course the latter will be more mature. If it wasn't, I'd seriously question the intelligence of anyone on the planet using it. > There are times when I want to create a page in Drupal and life would > be easier if Drupal behaved like Radiant. Is the lesson learned to not > put everything in one admin and mix concerns? How about a separate > admin area for end users where, for example, a blog entry is nothing > more than one or more paragraphs. You mean like Radiant does now? Install one of the blog samples and look at the admin tab "pages," look down the list to "Blog (Archive)" and look inside that tree. Blog posts, containing just a few paragraphs, just as requested. > The existing admin would be used by > developers and designers to create layouts and page prototypes which > can be selected by end users. > > Does this make sense at all? Not really. If you're serious, I think you're fishing for something akin to the existing "roles" in Radiant (follow the "users" link at the top of the admin page and look into creating a new user; see where it asks you to identify the roles for the new user?). At least it exists, but isn't fully functional, yet AFAICT, having only Administrator and Developer roles in by default. You're looking for something akin to "editor," "author" or "publisher" from your description I think, which don't appear to exist yet by default. Every role can be shown different parts of the admin, but the showing must be coded. Seriously, Radiant is far from perfect. I keep wrestling with a 3sec latency issue, for example. And I'm no fan of the documentation, or indeed some other corners of the place. But the point is, it's a 0.9 product, which is by definition not expected to be fully complete nor even truly fit for "normal" human consumption. Some of us are using it because with all its warts, it seems to be the best of a sorry lot of Rails-based CMS's, and it has potential. I'm expecting an upheaval when Rails 3.0 drops, so I wouldn't expect anything resembling 1.0 soon. And I'd expect chunks of the code to change, as well as some behavior, so writing and maintaining current documentation will be a complete headache, but I expect this will smooth out as 1.0 nears. Have Fun, Arlen ------------------------------ In God we trust, all others must supply data
