Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
2009/11/22 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/22/2009 10:10 AM: 2009/11/21 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: I'm a strong believer in simplification, and one of the axioms is Each Thing Does One Thing and Only One Thing. Overloading a single engine to do all you want sounds like a recipe for disaster. Well, I'm not really overloading a single engine. The radiant engine will only manage blogs and articles. That is kind of what it is designed for, I'd assume - dealing with articles and presenting them in some format accessible by a menu hierarchy. The separate forum software (whatever it is) will manage the forums. If the client wants something else added in the future, like a video presenting application, obviously that would be its own app. However I see what you're getting at. [1] See Rick Smiths' book Authentication http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201615991?ie=UTF8tag=emergentprope-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=390957creativeASIN=0201615991 P122: Indirect Authentication dresses the scalability problem posed by sites with a single user population but multiple points of service. Even a site with just two servers will want to avoid the headache of maintaining consistency between two separate authentication databases. That seems like a good way to implement user access control across several services, thanks. I shall see if I can have it done between the forum and radiant app in an extensible manner (hopefully without the use of something like LDAP, which I loathe too, even though I am proficient in it). Regards, Asfand Yar Qazi ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/23/2009 07:17 AM: 2009/11/22 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/22/2009 10:10 AM: 2009/11/21 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: I'm a strong believer in simplification, and one of the axioms is Each Thing Does One Thing and Only One Thing. Overloading a single engine to do all you want sounds like a recipe for disaster. Well, I'm not really overloading a single engine. The radiant engine will only manage blogs and articles. That is kind of what it is designed for, I'd assume - dealing with articles and presenting them in some format accessible by a menu hierarchy. The separate forum software (whatever it is) will manage the forums. If the client wants something else added in the future, like a video presenting application, obviously that would be its own app. First: I don't mean 'overload' in the sense of 'give it so much work it collapses'. Ruby, as it is now, may not be the most efficient of interpreters, but any reasonable server will be available to handle a few hundred transactions a minute :-) The Pickaxe book talks about scaling in very basic ways and Radiant has some excellent caching capability. No, I meant 'overloading' in the management sense. Do one thing... If anything kills a project its complexity. And I don't know where you get off slagging the excellent work by the various contributors to Radiant by implying its not as capable of being a forum engine as a blogging engine. And yes, there are plugins to handle video too. -- A man thinks that by mouthing hard words he understands hard things. - Herman Melville ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
2009/11/23 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: And I don't know where you get off slagging the excellent work by the various contributors to Radiant by implying its not as capable of being a forum engine as a blogging engine. And yes, there are plugins to handle video too. Sorry about that, I didn't mean to be insulting. I just thought the forum features weren't as mature as other more established forums. If you feel it is, then I shall surely look into it and present it to my clients as a possible forum solution. ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
2009/11/23 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: Its not about maturity. Its about what people have chosen to develop. One reason for Radiant was that it simply headed in a different driection from Joomla ... or Silverlight. But RoR and Radius makes Radiant very easy to alter. I agree. In particular I like the approach of aspect-oriented programming used in Radiant extensions. I think Rails is moving towards that sort of idiom as well, with the recent work on plugins having their own routes and translations as well as the usual M/V/Cs. However you must understand that the Radiant forum extension is competing against vBulletin, which my client is used to. I'm not saying vBulletin is good, it is just what the client is used to. And phpBB is the closest open source alternative. I will offer the radiant forum extension as an alternative, maybe they will prefer the simplicity - I certainly hope so. ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
2009/11/21 Steven Southard ste...@stevensouthard.com: This sounds like standard CMS stuff, doesn't it? The only sticking point seems to be the overall account scheme, where a single user account can do multiple things depending on what permissions it has. Will Radiant easily support these features, or is some hard development work required? From my experience with radiant I think a few of these features seem like you will be doing some development work to achieve. That said the CMS is quite flexible and I'm sure it could be made to do these things. I can't believe I'm saying this but with what your trying to do may I suggest you first look into Drupal before you start this project with Radiant. I don't know Drupal very well but I do know some sites made with it that have similar features. Good luck with what ever you choose. I don't know PHP or Drupal, but I know Ruby on Rails. Hence I will develop this platform using Rails, and since Radiant seems to be the number 1 CMS system on Rails, I will use that. The kind of thing (although simpler) I think my clients are looking for is http://anandtech.com/ 2009/11/21 Bentley, Dain dbent...@nas.edu: For comments have you looked at disqus? You can eve use facebook signon. Thanks I will consider that. 2009/11/21 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/21/2009 12:05 PM: I'd like to know if Radiant or one of its extensions offers some capabilities I'm looking for for a site I need to write for a client. Site. That's an important term. It means domain? Right? I mean 'site'. I know of several 'sites' where the all the features are rolled up into a single coherent interface (at least from the visitor's point of view), for example, http://www.anandtech.com/ (technology magazine) and http://www.therevival.co.uk (Muslim youth magazine). I wouldn't do this all with just one engine, even if I used Radiant for all the parts. Suppose you have a 'portal' at QizisCompany.com. I've done this with static HTML and embeded IFRAMES for news feeds, but there's no reason that this shouldn't be the front page of the magazine, and yes I believe it can be done with Radiant. But that front page can have a menu item for Blogs that actually takes you to Blogs.QizisCompany.com. Perhaps that'd done with Radiant, perhaps not. Another menu item goes to forums.qizisCompany.com . And so on. If you don't like the forum plugin for Radiant, try another RoR forum engine: Eldorado - http://eldorado.heroku.com/ I'm not going to skimp on forum features just because it has to be in Ruby on Rails - phpBB it is, because the rich feature set is worth it (and it's free compared to vBulletin). The main page has to have snippets of the latest blog entries, the latest forum posts, and a single username/password must be able to access all of these. Using separate apps makes this more difficult, but not impossible - I just have to delve into the database of each one and extract the text myself. Also, using different sub-domains causes search engines to treat each one as a separate site - SEO advice seems to recommend that everything is under the same domain, to increase search engine rankings. So I'm going to have them as 'xyzsite.com/forums' and 'xyzsite.com/blogs' etc. Thanks for the advice. SSO is a very fuzzy concept. Many of the authentication mechanisms give a cookie token back after login and have remember me so that when the user come back after a period (seconds, hours, days...) so long as they haven't deleted the cookie they are authenticated. If you make this happen at the DOMAIN level - see above - then you can make one form of SSO happen. There's a few IFs though. Authentication is not the the same as Authorization. Someone may log in to update their blog but that may not mean they are authorized to read private parts of the forum or submit articles to the journal. I suggest you look at using Role Based Access Control. I believe there is a plugin for it, but I don't know if it addresses this kind of thing. That's why I want to use a single engine for everything - RBAC becomes easier. If I have to use other software, I'll basically be creating accounts and logging people into them on the other software when they log onto my app. But phpBB, for example, has its own RBAC scheme, so that's ok. It means doubling work of administrators when assigning roles (first on the app, then on the forum software), but from the visitor's point of view, it seems consistent, because they only have to create an account once. But again thanks for the tips. Check out the plugins by 'spanner' http://github.com/spanner/radiant-reader-extension http://github.com/spanner/radiant-forum-extension Many thanks. That seems to be the kind of things I'm looking for. The 'Beast'-based forum is not suitable, my client is used to vBulletin's rich feature set, and only another mature forum
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/22/2009 10:10 AM: 2009/11/21 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/21/2009 12:05 PM: I'd like to know if Radiant or one of its extensions offers some capabilities I'm looking for for a site I need to write for a client. Site. That's an important term. It means domain? Right? I mean 'site'. I know of several 'sites' where the all the features are rolled up into a single coherent interface (at least from the visitor's point of view), for example, http://www.anandtech.com/ (technology magazine) and http://www.therevival.co.uk (Muslim youth magazine). Just for the record ... There is a multi-site plugin for Radiant, that lets more than one site run from the same engine. Each site has its own layout, snippets and css within the overall database. I see no reason the opposite can't be done as well. More than one Radiant 'engine' but with the same basic layout, banner, footer, main menu. Perhaps someone could comment on the 'efficiency' of this? For example, they need not be both implemented on the same machine. Yes, I note your point about SEO, Asfand, but then again, there are plugins and tools that can 'merge' subdomains so they appear as one. Can http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-seo_help-extension/ be used to help? I don't know. To be honest I've long given up on optimizing search engine submissions. When I submit things like my own name or that of the companies I've done sites for they always seem to come up on the first or second page of a google search WITHOUT any SEO work. I sometimes wonder the people selling SEO services, books, software, aren't just another scam and time waster. Or maybe I put the right stuff in the META the first time. Who knows. But I don't see SEO as a hurdle. ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/22/2009 10:10 AM: 2009/11/21 Anton Aylward anton.aylw...@rogers.com: I'm not going to skimp on forum features just because it has to be in Ruby on Rails - phpBB it is, because the rich feature set is worth it (and it's free compared to vBulletin). The main page has to have snippets of the latest blog entries, the latest forum posts, and a single username/password must be able to access all of these. Using separate apps makes this more difficult, but not impossible - I just have to delve into the database of each one and extract the text myself. It doesn't have to be like that! SSO is a very fuzzy concept. ... That's why I want to use a single engine for everything - RBAC becomes easier. If I have to use other software, I'll basically be creating accounts and logging people into them on the other software when they log onto my app. But phpBB, for example, has its own RBAC scheme, so that's ok. It means doubling work of administrators when assigning roles (first on the app, then on the forum software), but from the visitor's point of view, it seems consistent, because they only have to create an account once. I think you're labouring under a misapprehension. Certainly if you use a PHP engine for the forum and Radiant Engine for the other stuff you'll have this matter of hand copying. But there are simpler ways to do this. I once did up an application with a simple portal page and simple and SEPARATE account manager application/database. The account manager did more that 'just' access control, it also determined which of a number of databases the user could connect to.[1] Think about that for a moment. Its neither a new nor revolutionary concept. Single sign On in a large windows environment is done with something like an LDAP database. I don't particularly like LDAP, but its there and there's a lot of it. A plugin that overrides Radiant's existing authentication isn't going to be difficult. Does one already exist? Once a user has been authenticated to the domain a cookie can contain (signed and encrypted so it can't be hacked!) all the information that does the SSO. How do you think SSO in web based applications work anyway? The HTTP protocol is connectionless, so ANY login system has to use cookies to simulate a connection. I'm sure if I looked I could find a few media companies - ZDNet perhaps?? - that simulate SSO across multiple engines and subdomains using domain-level cookies.I know for sure my Amazon Affiliate login also authenticates me to the store. I'm a strong believer in simplification, and one of the axioms is Each Thing Does One Thing and Only One Thing. Overloading a single engine to do all you want sounds like a recipe for disaster. [1] See Rick Smiths' book Authentication http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201615991?ie=UTF8tag=emergentprope-20linkCode=as2camp=1789creative=390957creativeASIN=0201615991 P122: Indirect Authentication dresses the scalability problem posed by sites with a single user population but multiple points of service. Even a site with just two servers will want to avoid the headache of maintaining consistency between two separate authentication databases. -- A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. -- Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
[Radiant] Radiant capabilities
Hi, I'd like to know if Radiant or one of its extensions offers some capabilities I'm looking for for a site I need to write for a client. They want a 'magazine' type structure, with forum and blogs, using a single sign on. So someone can open an account, and be given permission to write articles. These are then approved by designated editors and published both to the front page, and to 'category' pages depending on what category the articles belong to. Comments may be left by visitors, who may or may not choose to sign up for an account on the site. All comments are moderated before being published. If they sign on with an account, they may choose to receive notifications via email when the comment is replied to. They may also edit their comments (again, which are moderated) if they sign up with an account before-hand. Visitors may use the forums on the site. I intend this to be something like phpBB, and somehow manipulate the phpBB cookies to make it a single sign on scheme. Visitors with accounts may be selected by moderators to have their own blogs. In addition, blog articles can be 'nominated' to the front page or a category page. In addition, there is a blogs page where the most recent blog articles from all authors are shown. This sounds like standard CMS stuff, doesn't it? The only sticking point seems to be the overall account scheme, where a single user account can do multiple things depending on what permissions it has. Will Radiant easily support these features, or is some hard development work required? Thanks, regards, Asfand Yar Qazi ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
They want a 'magazine' type structure, with forum and blogs, yes using a single sign on. dunno what you mean by that So someone can open an account, and be given permission to write articles. These are then approved by designated editors and published both to the front page, and to 'category' pages depending on what category the articles belong to. dunno but it sounds pretty useful Comments may be left by visitors, of course who may or may not choose to sign up for an account on the site. maybe All comments are moderated before being published. yes If they sign on with an account, they may choose to receive notifications via email when the comment is replied to. They may also edit their comments (again, which are moderated) if they sign up with an account before-hand. That could be a nice add on. I don't think anyone as made this yet. Visitors may use the forums on the site. I intend this to be something like phpBB, and somehow manipulate the phpBB cookies to make it a single sign on scheme. There is a new new forum extension but I haven't tried it out yet. Visitors with accounts may be selected by moderators to have their own blogs. In addition, blog articles can be 'nominated' to the front page or a category page. In addition, there is a blogs page where the most recent blog articles from all authors are shown. This sounds ambitious with Radiant This sounds like standard CMS stuff, doesn't it? The only sticking point seems to be the overall account scheme, where a single user account can do multiple things depending on what permissions it has. Will Radiant easily support these features, or is some hard development work required? From my experience with radiant I think a few of these features seem like you will be doing some development work to achieve. That said the CMS is quite flexible and I'm sure it could be made to do these things. I can't believe I'm saying this but with what your trying to do may I suggest you first look into Drupal before you start this project with Radiant. I don't know Drupal very well but I do know some sites made with it that have similar features. Good luck with what ever you choose. Steven ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
For comments have you looked at disqus? You can eve use facebook signon. -- Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Device - Original Message - From: radiant-boun...@radiantcms.org radiant-boun...@radiantcms.org To: radiant@radiantcms.org radiant@radiantcms.org Sent: Sat Nov 21 13:15:31 2009 Subject: Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities They want a 'magazine' type structure, with forum and blogs, yes using a single sign on. dunno what you mean by that So someone can open an account, and be given permission to write articles. These are then approved by designated editors and published both to the front page, and to 'category' pages depending on what category the articles belong to. dunno but it sounds pretty useful Comments may be left by visitors, of course who may or may not choose to sign up for an account on the site. maybe All comments are moderated before being published. yes If they sign on with an account, they may choose to receive notifications via email when the comment is replied to. They may also edit their comments (again, which are moderated) if they sign up with an account before-hand. That could be a nice add on. I don't think anyone as made this yet. Visitors may use the forums on the site. I intend this to be something like phpBB, and somehow manipulate the phpBB cookies to make it a single sign on scheme. There is a new new forum extension but I haven't tried it out yet. Visitors with accounts may be selected by moderators to have their own blogs. In addition, blog articles can be 'nominated' to the front page or a category page. In addition, there is a blogs page where the most recent blog articles from all authors are shown. This sounds ambitious with Radiant This sounds like standard CMS stuff, doesn't it? The only sticking point seems to be the overall account scheme, where a single user account can do multiple things depending on what permissions it has. Will Radiant easily support these features, or is some hard development work required? From my experience with radiant I think a few of these features seem like you will be doing some development work to achieve. That said the CMS is quite flexible and I'm sure it could be made to do these things. I can't believe I'm saying this but with what your trying to do may I suggest you first look into Drupal before you start this project with Radiant. I don't know Drupal very well but I do know some sites made with it that have similar features. Good luck with what ever you choose. Steven ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
Re: [Radiant] Radiant capabilities
Asfand Yar Qazi said the following on 11/21/2009 12:05 PM: Hi, I'd like to know if Radiant or one of its extensions offers some capabilities I'm looking for for a site I need to write for a client. Site. That's an important term. It means domain? Right? I wouldn't do this all with just one engine, even if I used Radiant for all the parts. Suppose you have a 'portal' at QizisCompany.com. I've done this with static HTML and embeded IFRAMES for news feeds, but there's no reason that this shouldn't be the front page of the magazine, and yes I believe it can be done with Radiant. But that front page can have a menu item for Blogs that actually takes you to Blogs.QizisCompany.com. Perhaps that'd done with Radiant, perhaps not. Another menu item goes to forums.qizisCompany.com . And so on. If you don't like the forum plugin for Radiant, try another RoR forum engine: Eldorado - http://eldorado.heroku.com/ They want a 'magazine' type structure, with forum and blogs, using a single sign on. SSO is a very fuzzy concept. Many of the authentication mechanisms give a cookie token back after login and have remember me so that when the user come back after a period (seconds, hours, days...) so long as they haven't deleted the cookie they are authenticated. If you make this happen at the DOMAIN level - see above - then you can make one form of SSO happen. There's a few IFs though. Authentication is not the the same as Authorization. Someone may log in to update their blog but that may not mean they are authorized to read private parts of the forum or submit articles to the journal. I suggest you look at using Role Based Access Control. I believe there is a plugin for it, but I don't know if it addresses this kind of thing. Check out the plugins by 'spanner' http://github.com/spanner/radiant-reader-extension http://github.com/spanner/radiant-forum-extension So someone can open an account, and be given permission to write articles. These are then approved by designated editors and published both to the front page, and to 'category' pages depending on what category the articles belong to. Yes, that's most definitely RBAC. See http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-page_review_process-extension/ This sounds like standard CMS stuff, doesn't it? The only sticking point seems to be the overall account scheme, where a single user account can do multiple things depending on what permissions it has. Will Radiant easily support these features, or is some hard development work required? Users and user groups seem covered in Will Spanner's plugins. I don't know if he implements any kind of RBAC. Perhaps this can be adapted http://github.com/dko/radiant-rbac_assets-extension/ http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-rbac_base-extension/ http://github.com/NoamB/acts_as_permissible/ See also http://github.com/saturnflyer/radiant-user_pref_control-extension/ Please let us know how you progress with this. /a ___ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
