Radiant (software)
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Radiant is a free-software content management system written in Ruby by John W. Long as a Ruby on Rails web application.
Radiant is limited to basic functionality for a CMS. The intended users are small groups or teams and thus the software leaves much room for extensions. All the content is stored inside a database. It's possible to use MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite. Radiant depends, like every Ruby on Rails application, on the installed adaperts for the database.
An independant review of Radiant was conducted by Frederic BRUNEL, who is a software architect and a technology enthusiast. His review is available at1
It's distributed via a separate download or installable with RubyGems.
Design
Radiant projects are based on 3 elements: Pages, Snippets and Layouts.
Pages: The content of every homepages is stored in Pages. Every page has specific attributes and it's content. If used in a e.g. blog, all blog entries are Pages inside the radiant system. They can be arranges hierarchically to reflect the actual structure of the content.
Snippets: Snippets are essentially just small parts of code that can be reused everywhere in the project and make content creation easier.
Layouts: To define the general look of a Page Layouts are used. Upon Page creation, a layout can be attached to that Page to define a frame for this Page to be inserted in.
Radius Template Language
Inside a Page, Layout or Snippet, Radiant offers special template tags, called Radius Tags, to easily access parameters, loop through content or make conditional checks.
Radius tags are XML tags that start with an r:
Radius tags inside a radiant layout:
<html>
<head><r:title /></head>
<body>
<r:snippet name="header"/>
<r:children:each limit="2">
<r:content />
<r:if_content part="sidebar">
<div class="sidebar">
<r:content part="sidebar" />
</div>
</r:if_content>
<r:snippet name="footer" />
</body>
</html>Extensions
Radiant includes by default 2 extensions.
- Textile
- Markdown
External links
- Official Radiant website
- RubyForge Radiant site
- ArtOfMission Radiant tutorial
- ruby-forum.com Radiant thread
de:Radiant_(CMS)