A new version of our favorite Ruby on Rails CMS has been released, Radiant CMS 0.9.0. Obviously, I spoke a little too soon last October when I announced that 0.9.0 was coming soon. Each open source community has their own pace and time-line for releasing the release candidates of their software. In retrospect, I should have noted that Radiant CMS developers like to take their time in making sure the Radiant releases are at a level of quality and stability they're comfortable with before releasing the final versions to the general public.

So what's new in the 0.9.0 version of Radiant CMS? Radiant now has a new UI, support for internationalization and loading of extensions as gems. Some of the more significant new features in this version of Radiant include::

• There are new features for pagination (requiring will_paginate).
• You can now run Radiant from a sub-directory.
• When selecting a published date in the future, Radiant will treat the content as hidden until that date
• Extensions may be loaded as gems and generated extensions now have features to easily create gems with Jeweler
• Radiant CMS is now running on Rails 2.3.8 (bundled with Radiant)

If you would like more details on the changes in Radiant CMS, you can always check out the CHANGELOG. Radiant 0.9.0 CMS is available for download from the RadiantCMS.org website.

Radiant 0.8.0 was released. While not that exciting of a release, at least it gives me something to talk about with regards to the Radiant CMS.

Radiant 0.8.0 “Asterism” features a brand new and more compliant caching mechanism based on Rack::Cache, and numerous bugfixes and small enhancements. Also included are:

• An extensive integration suite using Cucumber and Webrat
• Rails 2.3.2 (previously 2.1.2)
• Highline 1.5.1
• Haml 2.0.9

Additional development news can be found about Radiant CMS on their blog.

Occasionally, I see a post that I have written as a reference in a white paper, a book, or somewhere else online.  I actually started CMSReport.com as a place for me to learn more about Web content management systems and information systems.  Whenever someone references CMS Report it signals that we have gone full circle where someone is also learning from me.  There is not a more awesome feeling than this.

One thing I have yet to achieve is being a legitimate reference at Wikipedia.  Until now!  CMS Report is being referenced on the wiki page for Frog CMS.

1. ^ "phpRadiant to imitate Radiant CMS" (2007-01-04). Retrieved on 2008-04-28.

For those that do not not know, phpRadiant was the original project name for this current Frog CMS.  Frog CMS was inspired by the Ruby on Rails application, Radiant CMS.   Naturally, after two years in development, the developers for Frog CMS have become inspired with their own roadmap for building this CMS.  Frog is currently available at version 0.9.5 from the Frog CMS download page.

Radiant, a Ruby on Rails based CMS, will soon be released under version 0.7. The new version is currently available as a release candidate. 

The most significant changes between Radiant 0.6.9 and 0.7 will include:

• Admin controllers are now “RESTful”, i.e. they conform to the Rails convention for resources.
• Rails 2.1.2 is included.
• RSpec and RSpec-Rails are no longer packaged and are marked as gem dependencies. You need 1.1.11 or newer.
• There are now generators for mailers and migrations in extensions.
• The addition of some database indexes to increase performance.
• Radius tags can now access request parameters and URL helpers directly.

Complete Story

Radiant 0.6.6 was released over the weekend, shortly after the release of Radiant 0.6.5.  Obviously, 0.6.6 of this built with Ruby on Rails CMS was released to fix some bugs in 0.6.5.  So instead of focusing on the bugs, let's focus on what is new in 0.6.5/6 since Radiant 0.6.4 was released in November 2006.

Since Radiant 0.6.4, the latest versions of the software introduced two major changes:

• 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

Last night the core team finished polishing off the rough edges of the latest release of Radiant. This is the first serious release in well over 6 months. The big news in this release is that we have created a first-class extension system to make it easier for you to tailor Radiant to meet your needs. A lot of people have already started using the extension system to create a number of useful third party add-ons. There are also numerous bug-fixes and improvements in other areas of the application. If you are still on the 0.5.x series this upgrade is a must. Core team member Sean Cribbs has compiled a complete list of the changes over on his blog.

End users and site managers will notice improvements and new features:

Philippe Archambault wrote to us that he is working on a PHP version of Radiant CMS. Radiant CMS is based on the Ruby language. Mr. Archambault has appropriately named his CMS, phpRadiant. If imitation is a sincere form of flattery, then lets hope the Radiant CMS folks are blushing!

Mr. Archambault isn't the first person to suggest taking what they liked in Radiant CMS and migrating it from the Ruby language to one that is PHP based. However, his project is the first one that I know about which has actually seen the light of day.

I always find these type of stories ironic. Last week, I had someone make a comment to an old article I wrote on the Radiant CMS. For those liking Radiant, the commenter remarked "give cakePHP a trial run if you want a cms similar to this but in PHP". One of the reasons I chosen to discuss Radiant was that it was built with Ruby on Rails.

So where is the irony? Follow this, if you can and hopefully I won't confuse you. The article I wrote was titled, "Radiant, A Ruby CMS and PHP alternative". In other words we've gone full circle. CakePHP is being suggested as an alternative PHP content management system for the Ruby-based Radiant CMS which was originally suggested by me as an alternative for those that have tired with PHP Web applications!

Second irony, CakePHP is actually not a CMS but a framework. As Daniel Hofstetter points out below, think of CakePHP is to PHP as Ruby on Rails is to Ruby.

Third irony, regardless of the commenter calling CakePHP a CMS, the intention is the same. Everyone seems to want a Web application written in a particular language to be written in another language of their choosing. This desire to have a CMS written in another language appears to be a common theme here at CMS Report. I've always pointed out that when applications are written in another language, sometimes the elegance of that application is lost in the translation. Sort of like recording English over Japanese in a Godzilla movie. Somehow, I don't think Japanese producers ever intended the English version of the movie to be as humorous of a movie as it is when heard in here in the United States.

Note: Original post revised significantly after a few hours of sleep. Thought processes and comments gave me more to find ironic...

One day, one day...I pormise I will learn more about Ruby and the Raidant CMS.  Until then I'll just have to read about the excitement.  John Long writes:

I feel like this was the best of the Radiant presentations I have done to date...The presentation seems to have perked a lot of interest here at the conference. I’ve also spoken with many people who are already using Radiant on their own sites or are planning to use Radiant on a site in the near future. It’s always interesting to hear feedback and ideas about Radiant.

You can read more from Mr. Long through his post,   Ruby Conf Presentation.  He also provides a link to his presentation in PDF format.

Sean Cribbs writes in his post:

"John Long has invited me to author a “How To” column for the Radiant weblog. The purpose of this column is to collect and distill useful solutions to common tasks that one might want to accomplish with Radiant. These “How To” entries will supplement an already growing section of the wiki called HowTos. For our first installment, we’ll discuss how to create your own “global tags”, or Radius tags that are available to every page, and encapsulate those in a plugin."

Complete Story

Another "official" site has received a face, this time the Ruby language site. The Ruby site runs on the Ruby-based content management system, Radiant. My impressions in one word...Impressive.

In my opinion, Ruby as a programming language and Radiant as a CMS are still in its adolescent years of development. However, if the Ruby language site is any indication...it is more than ready to compete with those that have been around a lot longer.

There can be a lot of politics involved in changing community sites, but it seems that the site maintainers did everything right:

As you can see the much anticipated redesign is now live. It was over a year ago that it was suggested that a “visual identity team” be formed for the purpose of redesigning the Ruby Web site. The redesign team created over 20 mockups for the the new site, posted several for the Ruby community to comment on, and finally decided on the current design.

Once the design was chosen it was lovingly converted to CSS and XHTML and an administration system was written for it. The content was then ported over from the old Web site and massaged by an enthusiastic group of volunteers.

Congratulations to all those involved with this both leading edge languages and CMS.

"It’s been a bit quiet on the home front since the release of 0.5, but that doesn’t mean that we haven’t been busy. Without further ado, I present 0.5.1 release candidate 1:

http://radiantcms.org/downloads/radiant-0.5.1-rc1.gem

Why a release candidate? Mainly because this version included major changes to the radiant command to allow users to upgrade existing installs. I’d like for people to test it pretty thoroughly before we release it into the wild."

Complete Story

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.