I'm always happy to see comments like this. If we don't know where there are problems, we can't make the project better. Thanks, Christian.
On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 5:11 AM, Christian Aust <[email protected]> wrote: > Folks, > > this is not about bashing Radiant. Instead, I'd like to mention a few things > that make it harder to sell Radiant-based solutions to customers who often > answer "Why don't you use Wordpress for the job?" > > (1) Radiant is like a toolbox for websites, but not quite. > > From a developer perspective, Radiant doesn't stand in the way while I'm > building the next great website for a customer. It's a great tool to build > and develop. From a customer (aka. "end user") perspective, Radiant is a > bunch of input boxes where you have to enter cryptic stuff which looks a lot > like code. Well, in fact it is. Thats why some of my customers wouldn't ever > trade in their wordpress UI for a nifty Radiant site. Which is a shame > because they could do so much better. How can I sell Radiant to users who > don't recognize the simply aesthetics of Textile {or any other markup}? If it's cryptic, you're doing it wrong. Sample Radiant sites are also doing it wrong too, so that needs to be fixed in our templates. But you should do everything you can to hide Radius from the typical user. For different users that changes, and overtime in may change with any user. I used to use Textile, but it requires too much knowledge about what HTML is and has an expectation that you understand it's features. It feels more like HTML shorthand, whereas Markdown feels more like just marking up my content. So what you use, depends on your users. Not only that, but there are extensions to add wysiwyg editors. http://ext.radiantcms.org/ and if you can't find them there, you might find them at https://github.com/search?type=Everything&language=&q=radiant+editor&repo=&langOverride=&x=0&y=0&start_value=1 > > (2) Core Radiant isn't enough to build a real-world website. > > HTML, javascript, css and images, that what you'll typically need. Radiant > (at least edge) handles the first three pretty well, considering (1). For > images, you need the paperclipped extension. Why isn't this core > functionality? And even it it was: URLs like /assets/47/some_image.png > contain that database id, which changes with every installation and make them > hard to remember. Why would you try to remember an image path? There are radius tags for that in paperclipped itself. Core Radiant has been plenty for many "real-world" websites (whatever that means). Some sites may not need uploading of images. Others can add an extension to do it (and there's more than just paperclipped: page_attachments, mediamaid, cy_image, upload, and more). Eventually, we'll have some image handling capability in the core application, but Radiant didn't become popular because it had everything in it; it became popular because it was so simple and extensible. > > (3) Upgrading is a pain. > > Even if I dont like it: Upgrading Wordpress is a breeze. Upgrading Radiant > usually involves SSH connections, terminal commands, some gem handling and > server restarting. Not a breeze, not at all. I can do that, but end users > typically can't. PHP and Ruby are fundamentally different languages. If you want an end user to be able to upgrade Radiant, you'll need to write the piece that does that (and it will be complicated). The main reason you can do that in Wordpress is that someone made it so. I'm personally working hard to make upgrading Radiant easier (and part of that is just plain old planning), but there are still a lot of ideas and code to be hammered out. But you said it best when you began here "Even if I dont like it..." I'd much rather enjoy my work everyday and have an occasional upgrade hiccup that not like working with the tool and have the upgrades go smoothly: "Yay, I can easily use the next version which I will enjoy just as little as this one." > > How do you think about this? I'd love to contribute to make stuff easier, but > I'm not sure where to start. Any comment is welcome. Kind regards, > > Christian I want good ideas from anywhere. Radiant isn't built to be just like project X or to have all the features of project Y. It's build to be whatever we decide and it's getting more powerful and more flexible with each release. Where to start? Wherever you care. I started by writing extensions and then realized that the existing <r:if_content> tags needed serious work and additional features. That got me into more and more. I found kindred spirits in the community and bounced ideas off of them. John Muhl and I would work on fixing bugs before either of us even had commit rights. I'd write to the previous maintainer, Sean Cribbs, and let him know that fixed some bug or that I pulled in features from other forks and all tests passed for me. Where should you start? How about here http://github.com/radiant/radiant/issues Or here http://github.com/radiant/radiant-prototype Or contribute to http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-help-extension Even if you don't understand some piece of code, you eventually will by trying to figure it out or someone will help you out with it. > > p.s.: Will be at ArrrrCamp tomorrow. Who else? I *really* wish I could be there. -- Jim Gay Saturn Flyer LLC http://www.saturnflyer.com 571-403-0338
