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Radiant 0.6.6 - Chiseled Release Sean

Radiant 0.6.6 “Chiseled” corrects two showstopper bugs in yesterday’s 0.6.5 release that affect upgrading existing installations and the proper functioning of view templates in extensions. All users of 0.6.5 should upgrade immediately. My apologies to all who installed 0.6.5 and had problems!

Installation

To install use the gem command (with ‘sudo’ as necessary):

$ gem install radiant

Upgrading an existing project/site

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.6” or remove it altogether.

2. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

3. Copy your customizations back into config/environment.rb, if necessary (see below).

4. Migrate the database:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Creating a new project/site

1. Invoke the radiant command with your desired database driver:

$ radiant -d sqlite3 my_project

2. Bootstrap the database:

$ cd my_project
$ rake db:bootstrap

3. Startup the server and try it out!

$ script/server

Internal Changes to config/environment.rb

The 0.6.5 release has required a lot of changes to the internal API of Radiant. End-users should be unaffected, but as a result of these requirements, we have made significant changes to config/environment.rb and config/boot.rb. When updating your existing projects, config/environment.rb will be copied to config/environment.bak. You will need to manually copy any customizations, especially config.extensions and any other libraries, etc. that you require. DO NOT copy config.load_paths, config.plugin_paths, or any of those items to the new file; those settings have been internalized in this release. If you have further questions, please address them to the mailing list.

Radiant 0.6.5 - Chisel Release Sean

It’s finally here! Radiant 0.6.5 “Chisel”, after over 4 months of grueling anticipation, is released. This represents a major leap forward for Radiant. The major changes are:

• Rails 2.0.2 included (0.6.4 used Rails 1.2.5)
• RSpec 1.1.4 is used in core and supported in extensions

In addition to those major changes, these enhancements may be of interest:

• It is now possible to edit the published date of a page from the editing interface.
• Pages now have “description” and “keywords” fields that can be output as <meta> tags using the r:meta family of tags.
• Green notice areas will fade from the interface after 3 seconds.
• The r:find tag now accepts relative paths.
• URLs in the admin interface and in standard Radius tags should now respect when Radiant is installed in a “subdirectory” rather than the root URL namespace.

For developers:

• RSpec and scenarios are supported in extensions.
• The created_by and updated_by fields on all models have been renamed to created_by_id and updated_by_id, respectively.
• Radiant has its own Autotest class that runs extension specs as well as the core specs.
• Admin-related javascripts like ‘ruled_table’ have been moved to public/javascripts/admin.

Installation

To install use the gem command (with ‘sudo’ as necessary):

$ gem install radiant

The gem will install as ‘radiant-0.6.5’.

Upgrading an existing project/site

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.5” or remove it altogether.

2. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

UPDATE: There is a minor bug when upgrading if the public/javascripts/admin directory does not exist. Please create this directory in your project to alleviate the problem. The bug has been fixed in edge.

3. Copy your customizations back into config/environment.rb, if necessary (see below).

4. Migrate the database:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Creating a new project/site

1. Invoke the radiant command with your desired database driver:

$ radiant -d sqlite3 my_project

2. Bootstrap the database:

$ cd my_project
$ rake db:bootstrap

3. Startup the server and try it out!

$ script/server

Internal Changes to config/environment.rb

This release has required a lot of changes to the internal API of Radiant. End-users should be unaffected, but as a result of these requirements, we have made significant changes to config/environment.rb and config/boot.rb. When updating your existing projects, config/environment.rb will be copied to config/environment.bak. You will need to manually copy any customizations, especially config.extensions and any other libraries, etc. that you require. DO NOT copy config.load_paths, config.plugin_paths, or any of those items to the new file; those settings have been internalized in this release. If you have further questions, please address them to the mailing list.

Announcing the Radiant Podcast Sean

The first episode of the Radiant Podcast is now available. In our first episode, Sean interviews John Bachir and Josh French of Digital Pulp. In future episodes, we plan to speak with John Long, James Macaulay and Tobias Luetke of shopify, and a number of other prominent Radiant users.

Subscribe and enjoy!

Radiant 0.6.5 Release Candidate 2 Sean

It’s time for another release candidate of Radiant 0.6.5! Thanks to “Radiant Day” and some healthy participation, we’re almost there. It is my feeling that we’ll likely have a final release next week. As before, these are the big changes in 0.6.5:

• Rails 2.0.2 included
• RSpec is used in core and supported in extensions

In addition to those several significant changes have been made since 0.6.5 RC1:

• Better support for specs in extensions
  • Generated spec_helper.rb should work as intended
  • Scenarios are supported in extensions
  • rake spec:extensions will only attempt to run specs in extensions that contain them
• Core extensions include both specs and traditional test/unit tests.
• Some CSS and HTML bugfixes and enhancements
• Better spec/code coverage overall, including specs for view helpers

You can download the Radiant 0.6.5 RC2 here.

This release candidate is intended for developers and is NOT intended for production use. Please report any bugs you find to the development site.

Installation

To install use the gem command (with ‘sudo’ as necessary):

$ gem install radiant-0.6.5-rc2.gem

The gem will install as ‘radiant-0.6.5’.

Upgrading an existing project/site

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.5” or remove it altogether.

2. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

3. Copy your customizations back into config/environment.rb, if necessary (see below).

4. Migrate the database if you are running 0.6.2 or earlier:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Creating a new project/site

1. Invoke the radiant command with your desired database driver:

$ radiant -d sqlite3 my_project

2. Bootstrap the database:

$ cd my_project
$ rake db:bootstrap

3. Startup the server and try it out!

$ script/server

Internal Changes to config/environment.rb

This release has required a lot of changes to the internal API of Radiant. End-users should be unaffected, but as a result of these requirements, we have made significant changes to config/environment.rb and config/boot.rb. When updating your existing projects, config/environment.rb will be copied to config/environment.bak. You will need to manually copy any customizations, especially config.extensions and any other libraries, etc. that you require. DO NOT copy config.load_paths, config.plugin_paths, or any of those items to the new file; those settings have been internalized in this release. If you have further questions, please address them to the mailing list.

GitHub Experiment Sean

As explained on the mailing list, in an effort to encourage contributions to Radiant, we have created an experimental clone of the Radiant SVN repository on GitHub. If you are on GitHub, we encourage you to fork Radiant, work on some bugs, specs, or features, and then send a pull request to Sean. If you are not on GitHub, or have no idea what ‘git’ is, ask your friends for a GitHub invite (sorry I used all of mine) and then check out the wonderful PeepCode screencast.

Blogging About Radiant? John

Brian Dillard is doing an interesting series of articles on his experience working on converting the Pathfinder Website to Radiant. You can read more about it over on the Pathfinder Weblog:

• Radiant CMS: It’s all about the extensions
• Radiant CMS: Some tradeoffs, but they’re worth it
• Radiant CMS and the DRY principle

Mohit Sindhwani has also written a couple of articles helping people get up on running on Radiant:

• “Hello World” using Radiant CMS
• Radiant CMS – Showing the date of articles

Are you blogging about Radiant? Have you written an article helping people to get started or discussing some obscure feature of Radiant? Link it up in the comments and post it on Erik Mallinson’s wonderful Magnolia Group tracking articles about Radiant.

AVLUX is Now Hosting the Main Radiant Site John

I’m happy to announce that the main Radiant site is now being hosted by the kind folks at AVLUX. If you are seeing this page it means that the DNS has now propagated correctly. Andrew vonderLuft has been instrumental in orchestrating the transition and deserves a medal for his patience with us during the process.

AVLUX specializes in hosting for Ruby on Rails applications. They offer both shared and dedicated plans in addition to Subversion hosting—all at reasonable prices. They can get you setup on their servers in under 24 hours with no setup fees.

If you are looking for a host for your next Radiant deployment or Ruby on Rails application, consider AVLUX!

Radiant 0.6.5 Release Candidate 1 Sean

Radiant 0.6.5 has been a long time coming! And just to be sure, we want to release a candidate or two to make sure we have everything solid. There are some really major changes in this release, and here’s the two big ones:

• Rails 2.0.2 included
• RSpec is used in core and supported in extensions

You can download the Radiant 0.6.5 RC1 here.

This release candidate is intended for developers and is NOT intended for production use. Please report any bugs you find to the development site.

Installation

To install use the gem command (with ‘sudo’ as necessary):

$ gem install radiant-0.6.5-RC1.gem

The gem will install as ‘radiant-0.6.5’.

Upgrading an existing project/site

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.5”

2. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

3. Copy your customizations back into config/environment.rb, if necessary (see below).

4. Migrate the database if you are running 0.6.2 or earlier:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Creating a new project/site

1. Invoke the radiant command with your desired database driver:

$ radiant -d sqlite3 my_project

2. Bootstrap the database:

$ cd my_project
$ rake db:bootstrap

3. Startup the server and try it out!

$ script/server

Internal Changes to config/environment.rb

This release has required a lot of changes to the internal API of Radiant. End-users should be unaffected, but as a result of these requirements, we have made significant changes to config/environment.rb and config/boot.rb. When updating your existing projects, config/environment.rb will be copied to config/environment.bak. You will need to manually copy any customizations, especially config.extensions and any other libraries, etc. that you require. DO NOT copy config.load_paths, config.plugin_paths, or any of those items to the new file; those settings have been internalized in this release. If you have further questions, please address them to the mailing list.

Art of Mission Launches Radiant Factory John

Ryan Heneise, of Art of Mission, has just launched a new service built on Radiant. It’s called Radiant Factory. Basically, Ryan is offering professional assistance to anyone who needs help getting up and running with Radiant.

Ryan can help you:

• Slice your design into HTML and images;
• Turn your HTML into layouts, snippets, and pages;
• Write custom extensions for Radiant or install existing extensions;
• Deploy and host your Radiant install on a variety of hosting solutions (Rails Playground, Media Temple, Slicehost, etc…)

This is a dream come true for people looking to get started on Radiant who don’t have a lot of experience with Rails or Ruby. Ryan and I were chatting about this last week when he told me that he believes ease of deployment is one of the main things holding Radiant back right now. Rails applications are notoriously hard to deploy. Especially, when you compare them to something written in PHP. With Radiant Factory Ryan is hoping to lower the barrier of entry a little. Hopefully, this will make it easy for more people experience this great little CMS.

Update: Ryan has had to put Radiant Factory on hold as he is now busy with other business.

Mislav Marohnić Joins Core Team Sean

We are very happy to welcome Mislav Marohnić to the RadiantCMS core team. His contributions to cleaning up the Javascript in Radiant 0.6.4 have been invaluable. Mislav is also a member of the Prototype core team and a contributor to numerous other open-source projects. Congratulations, Mislav, and keep up the good work!

Radiant 0.6.4 - Gem Shaper Release Sean

This release contains a few major changes as well as numerous bug-fixes and enhancements. Included in the release are Rails 1.2.5, Prototype 1.6 and script.aculo.us 1.8. Significant refactorings have been done to the admin UI Javascripts, thanks to Mislav Marohnic. The release also provides better support for MS SQL Server via Rails ticket/patch #8886 and stricter XHTML compatibility.

For a complete list of what’s new, see the CHANGELOG.

To upgrade:

1. Update the Radiant gem:

gem update radiant

2. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.4”

3. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

4. Migrate the database if you are running 0.6.2 or earlier:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Please give the gem a chance to propagate to the RubyForge download servers.

Radiant 0.6.3 - Rock Grinder Release Sean

This release contains many progressive changes and bugfixes, especially with respect to the extension system. Of special note are:

• conversion to using ActiveRecord-based sessions and storing the id of the logged-in user in the session instead of the complete user object
• addition of the ability to specify the loading-order (and inclusion/exclusion) of extensions in environment.rb
• automatic loading of Rails plugins included in extensions upon activation.

For a complete list of what’s new, see the CHANGELOG.

To upgrade:

1. Update the Radiant gem:

gem update radiant

2. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.3”

3. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

4. Migrate the database to create the ActiveRecord sessions:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Please give the gem a chance to propagate to the RubyForge download servers.

Radiant's Near Future Sean

I’ve recently been contracted to work with Digital Pulp on customizing Radiant for a BIG client of theirs. The bright side of this, besides getting paid to work on Radiant, is that much of the work will be released to the community when it’s finished and I’ll be able to contribute updates to the core along the way. Here’s a preview of what’s coming:

• Facets-like UI mutability, packaged as an extension!
• “Templates” that constrain the page UI and page parts (similar to the PageAttributes idea)
• Separating the published versions from working copies, like #502

And much more! Radiant 0.6.3 will probably be released along the way as bugs are fixed, too. I’ll be announcing on my personal blog, on the mailing list, and the Radiant blog as things get released.

Radiant 0.6.2 - Jewel Carver Release (Minor Update) John

This is a minor update in the 0.6 series. The primary benefit to it is that people using Sean Cribb’s Page Attachements extension can now use it without running on edge. For a complete list of what’s new, see the CHANGELOG.

To upgrade:

1. Update the Radiant gem:

gem update radiant

2. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.6.2”

3. Restart the server

Please give the gem a chance to propagate to the RubyForge download servers.

Tutorial: Creating Radiant Extensions John

One of the most exciting aspects of Radiant 0.6 is the support that has been added for extensions. Since Radiant is a “no-fluff” content management system there are a lot of features supported by other systems that will never make it into Radiant. I’ve tried to keep things clean and simple so that Radiant is easy to learn and easy to support. The trouble is, my opinion of what features constitute “fluff” and what features are absolutely necessary is probably different than your own. Extensions give you the opportunity to change this.

Using extensions you can customize nearly every aspect of Radiant. And because Radiant is made with Ruby on Rails, developing an extension is almost as easy as developing a regular Ruby on Rails application.

In this tutorial I want to help you get started with your first extension. We will cover:

• Using extension generators
• Creating a custom model and controller
• Running extension migrations
• Creating custom tags

I will assume that you already have the latest Radiant gem installed on your local computer and that you have a basic understanding of Ruby on Rails. If you have never used Ruby on Rails before please run through the Rolling with Rails tutorials (Part I, II, & III) before you begin.

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