When I first found Radiant five years ago, Rails had barely arrived at version 2.3. The plugin system of Radiant was plain awesome, as it allowed me to customize both UI and models, having migrations and whatnot. Rails could not do that back then. Radiant was great, I used it very successfully for a number of client projects.
*[btw, there's a nice interview with Sean<http://www.railsinside.com/interviews/86-radiant-cms-interview-with-sean-cribbs.html>detailling the history of Radiant] * Times have changed though. Radiant features a number of ingenious but bizarre hacks (extension UIs, I'm looking at you, also the tag system) that make it both hard to understand for novices and hard to maintain at the same time. The whole plugin ecosystem relies on mechanisms that should have been Rails engines today – but these simply did not exist when the plugin system was implemented. Now we have hundreds of extensions, some of them so wildly outdated that it's actually a miracle how they still work. But drastically changing how plugins should be implemented would almost break them all. So what? To me it seems as if projects like the comfortable mexican sofa<https://github.com/comfy/comfortable-mexican-sofa>adopted really great concepts of Radiant, like the idea of layouts/pages/snippets, while staying compatible with standard Rails at the same time. I'm not sure if Radiant will be able to make the transition to a modern Rails application, without major rewrites and loosing compatibility to all its previous versions. I'm not even sure if it'd be worth the effort: I loved Radiant for allowing me to quickly build a site without too much hassle. The sites I built that way could be rewritten just as easily using something else today. Truth be told, I'm keeping my Radiant sites up as long as I can but I do not plan to create new sites using Radiant as it is today. The same applies to my extensions: They served a very specific purpose at the time I wrote them. No need to update them while there's almost no possibility that I might reuse them for something new. Just my $.02 Regards, Christian On Wednesday, May 22, 2013 6:08:59 PM UTC+2, Julian Hurley wrote: > > There's about 4 people on the irc, the project on github has build errors > and its dependancies are out of date, the last update of your average > extension is around *three years ago*, whenever I run the server I'm > greeted with dozens of warnings about insecure protocols and the like. > What's going on guys? Quite excited about this cms, seemed just what I > needed, but things seem very out of date. > > And why is the directory structure on your project on your github page > completely different to the directory structure generated by the latest > gem? And why doesn't the project have an 'app' directory? It's the weirdest > thing I've ever encountered (after the amount I've spent with rails, an > application without a app directory is like a person running around without > a head). > > Bizzare. What's going on? > -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Radiant CMS" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
