In particular, for your audience, one of the things that Radiant has over Refinery is the power it gives the end user over the final content.
For example, Refinery only allows 1 layout and it's controlled in committing code to your repository and deploying changes. (unless this has changed recently). Radiant puts the control for editing layouts in the hands of the end user (with appropriate rights) and allows you as many as you like. There's an argument that you might actually want to limit access to HTML code like that, but the benefit is that with Radiant, you get to decide according to the project needs (by adding an extension to alter the behavior). I've used (and contributed to) extensions that get layout and snippet code from the file system, but one of the big selling points is that you can hire a developer to put together the site and hire some other designer or developer to make changes to it later: you are free to choose and control the output of your own site. Total control of the output is there. While it's not necessarily obvious, you can make your own RSS, Atom, XML, css, whatever type of content and feed it out. Radiant doesn't care, whereas, Refinery just spits out HTML (as far as I know). I've got more points about why Radiant is great, but I'm curious about what others have to say. I don't know if the order you listed is what you're planning, but if you're trying to convince people to try Radiant put the "why NOT" before the "why". You want them to remember the "why". The most common questions I get about Radiant are: 1) can i use it with my *existing* application? 2) why is it so difficult to get extensions working? and now 3) when will it be on Rails 3 for #1 I just answered that here http://groups.google.com/group/radiantcms/browse_thread/thread/b691cf9ab644a8b2 for #2 it's a generalization but most often its because some extension developer has not updated the extension in 6 months (or something) or the person asking the question didn't ask for help for what could be a very minor (or major) compatibility problem. That's on of the reason's why we're not just willy-nilly jumping into Rails 3: because there is a very large user base and over 200 extensions in the registry and who knows how many existing websites could break in some way without a considerate plan. On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 3:58 PM, Joel Oliveira <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey everyone - > Next month's Boston.rb meeting (Jul 12) -- http://bostonrb.org/ -- is going > to be centered around two of the more popular Rails-based CMS's out there. > I'll be presenting on our dear Radiant (of course) and Refinery will be > presented by fellow Boston rubyist, and all around awesome guy, Dan Pickett. > I'm not so much concerned with coming out on top as "king shh of rails cms > mountain" (ok maybe a little bit) ... but want to be absolutely sure I act > as a good ambassador for the Radiant project. I have a few ideas for the > points I'd like to touch on but figured I would open it up to the list to > see if there are any specific things I should absolutely not miss. In > other words - help me make absolutely sure we come away with some converts. > > history > installation / dependencies? > the extensions system > why choose Radiant? > when NOT to choose Radiant > road map > > If anyone has gone through the similar experience and noticed there were > questions during/after about things you didn't expect - what would they be? > > Thanks for your input! > - Joel -- Jim Gay Saturn Flyer LLC http://www.saturnflyer.com 571-403-0338
