Re: [Radiant] Is this project dead?

[Jim Gay]

Radiant is alive!
It's sad, of course, that I have to insist that.

There's a lot of history in Radiant. Much of what Rails can now do
with engines could not be done when support for extensions were
created. This project was a pioneer for that stuff, but it wasn't kept
up to date with changes.

To make a long story short: the app directory is loaded from the gem.
Your extensions have an app directory too.
A radiant project is changed via extensions, so you might include the
ones you want, but then create your own custom alterations to change
features.

A common criticism of working with Radiant was/is that you need to
turn your app into a Radiant project. Rails is far more powerful now
and we want to be able to add Radiant to your existing Rails app
(rather than the other way around).

Please continue to raise your concerns, criticize, and offer your
opinions. That's how we grow.



On Wed, May 22, 2013 at 12:08 PM, Julian Hurley
<jul...@designimperial.com> 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 and its dependancies are out of date, the last update of your average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 seem very out of date.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?
>
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--
Write intention revealing code #=> http://www.clean-ruby.com

Jim Gay
Saturn Flyer LLC
571-403-0338

[Jim Gay]

Yes.
The master branch is moving in this direction.

On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 4:50 PM, cthulhu <stanislav....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Are any plans to move(rebuild) it on Rails 4.0 ?
>
> среда, 22 мая 2013 г., 19:08:59 UTC+3 пользователь Julian Hurley написал:

[Christian Aust]

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 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 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