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DrupalCon San Francisco 2010

Radiant, A Ruby CMS and PHP alternative

By Bryan - Posted on 11 July 2006

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Current features of Radiant, according to its home Website, include:

  • An elegant user interface
  • The ability to arrange pages in a hierarchy
  • Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language (Radius)
  • Special page-oriented plugins called behaviors
  • A simple user management/permissions system
  • Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML (it's easy to create other filters)
  • Operates in two modes: dev and production depending on the URL
  • A caching system which expires pages every 5 minutes
  • Built using Ruby on Rails (which means that extending Radiant is as easy as any other Rails application)
  • Licensed under the MIT license
  • And much more...

The latest version of Radiant is 0.5 and is available for download.

 

 

Comments

#1 PHP Version

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on August 13, 2006 - 1:56pm.
Someone should make a PHP version of this, I mean, I am surprised, no PHP developer thought to make a system like this for free before. Wordpress and Textpattern exist but, they are more like News Managers.

#2 PHP Radiant?

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on August 23, 2006 - 1:44am.

I'm just curious what you see in Radiant that is not in other PHP CMS? Also, I wonder if Radiant would be Radiant if it had been developed outside the Ruby programming community? Interesting thought. Either way...it's neat to see some new approaches to CMS taking place.

#3 Frog CMS

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on October 13, 2008 - 12:33pm.

There is a PHP Alternative it's called Frog CMS, it can be found here: http://www.madebyfrog.com, it's PHP5 based and uses MySQL.

It in version .9*, so I am sure you'll learn to love it if you used PHP.

#4 I have been using WordPress

Bob Digital's picture
Submitted by Bob Digital (not verified) on October 3, 2006 - 3:31pm.
I have been using WordPress Textpattern and Drupal for years..and research other top CMS.. none of them have the elegance of radiant, in terms of its heirarchal structure, lean interface and balance of power/features. I will be looking forward to see how it shapes up for version 1. It would be interesting to see a PHP solution like this

#5 CakePHP

Luxbot's picture
Submitted by Luxbot (not verified) on October 24, 2006 - 9:27pm.
Give cakePHP a trial run if you want a cms similar to this but in php. http://www.cakephp.org/

#6 I have make a try

Philworks's picture
Submitted by Philworks (not verified) on January 3, 2007 - 10:58am.
Go and see http://www.philworks.com/phpradiant/ to see the dev about my version of radiant in php

#7 Radiant is, erm, radiant

Erik Mallinson's picture
Submitted by Erik Mallinson (not verified) on February 10, 2007 - 12:11pm.
I created sites with Drupal, Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo, and Mephisto. Radiant is amazing. I've been able to create sites in a couple of hours that I've spent months trying to hack other CMS's to do. I realized after making a couple of Radiant sites that I spent most of my time turning off features of Drupal and trying to get it to do things, Radiant is so fast and flexible that it becomes trivial. I'm eagerly awaiting the addition of page sorting, where the admin can move pages around in the backend.

#8 page reorder

Pascal's picture
Submitted by Pascal (not verified) on January 13, 2009 - 2:56am.

There is a page reorder extension at http://github.com/radiant/radiant-reorde... (i've experienced some problems with the latest radiant site i was building and created a fork (http://github.com/simplificator/radiant-...)

#9 A real PHP CMS

PBills's picture
Submitted by PBills (not verified) on September 12, 2007 - 3:17pm.
"CMS Made Simple" is a CMS written in PHP. I've actually used it to make websites. Unlike Drupal, WordPress, etc, this started and remains CMS software. No hacks to make it so. To the user, it may appear more friendly than Radiant (uses wysiwyg javascript for editing pages). Unlike cake php, it's a finished CMS product (not a framework).

#10 Joomla?

ben's picture
Submitted by ben (not verified) on September 19, 2008 - 2:49pm.

How do folks who've done Radiant and Joomla compare the two CMSes?

#11 Framework + Easy Manager + More than a blog system

Sigurd Magnusson's picture
Submitted by Sigurd Magnusson (not verified) on October 24, 2007 - 8:55pm.
Most of the comments above are talking about people wanting; a) a rich framework (ala ruby on rails, cake, django, et al) so that you can program quickly b) a fully-fledged backend admin system that is EASY for content managers to use (ala wordpress) without being complex from being cluttered as a site-building tool. So that people managing the site can do their job. c) is more than a blogging tool. In other words, that it is designed for fully-fledged websites (ala cmsmadesimple, drupal, etc), so that you're not wasting time repurposing a tool. The SilverStripe Open Source CMS provides this, and only months after being launched, SilverStripe is already a finalist in the packtpub open source awards, as well as being involved in the Google Summer of Code program in which they paid for 10 programmers to add features like image editing inside a CMS...
Bryan's picture

About this CMS Enthusiast

Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch. Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government.