radiant

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.

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.