Radiant CMS - Interview with Sean Cribbs

Although Radiant may not be as well known among many Rails developers when compared to other Rails based CMS solutions such as Typo or Mephisto. Radiant is a powerful solution that has been steadily growing in popularity over time. Recently there have even been a number of Radiant specific openings posted around the Ruby and Rails job sites as more enterprises and agencies have begun adopting Radiant as their preferred solution for CMS capabilities.

Current lead developer Sean Cribbs recently posted about an upcoming Radiant Sprint Weekend designed to bring together a group of coders, designers and writers to Carrboro, NC with a focus on creating copious amounts code, design, and documentation for the upcoming 0.7 release of Radiant CMS. So I caught up with Sean to ask some questions about Radiant and his upcoming Sprint Weekend.

What is Radiant?

Radiant is a content management system that strips away all of the unnecessary junk that you get with most CMS software. It distills the essence of building a mostly-static site down to the essentials - pages, the actual content of the site, organized hierarchically in a tree; snippets, reusable pieces of content; and layouts, the wireframes or 'design' of the site. It ties these three pieces together with an elegant tag-based template language called Radius that gives the designer complete control over the output while making many common needs -- generating navigation or showing the five latest articles, for example -- very simple to perform. All of this is accessible from a simple and straightforward administration user-interface. Radiant also includes an automatic 5-minute page cache that speeds up response times while keeping the content reasonably fresh.

Why would a developer want to use Radiant?

Radiant isn't just for publishing static sites. We realized about two years ago that the most common use-case for a CMS is where someone has a site with a lot of static content, but some customized non-content-oriented functionality is needed too. Luckily, Radiant is built on Rails, so it has a lot of the tools that developers need baked-in.

However, it was hard to keep concerns separated and support all the needs that developers had with only the Rails plugin architecture. So in an effort to support those needs, the dev team built a mega-plugin system that we call "extensions". The beauty of extensions is that they work like plugins, adding their functionality after the rest of the framework is loaded, but they look like miniature Rails applications. An extension can have an app/ directory with all the typical Rails stuff, database migrations, public assets, plugins, routes, and a Test::Unit or RSpec suite. Extensions can modify the core of Radiant functionality through metaprogramming and even define their own page-types and Radius tags. Furthermore, there have been recent efforts to make sure most elements of Radiant's user-interface are customizable on the fly, allowing you to inject your own view code into any part of the interface.

It was funny -- at the core team panel at RailsConf 2008, someone asked if Rails plugins would ever fully support routes and migrations. The consensus from the core team was a tentative "no". I wanted to jump up and down and yell, "Hey! Radiant does that!" Its extension system has been borrowed for use in the awesome e-commerce software Spree, and inspired a recent plugin architecture enhancement called "Desert" from PivotalLabs' Brian Takita.

Radiant also has a commitment to code quality. We're always trying to make our test-suite better, and we value clear code over clever or compact code. Sometimes this means our development cycle moves slower, but it's more important to get it right, in my opinion. The biggest blunders I've made over the past year with Radiant were in haste, which, to me, further drives home this principle. The extension system also helps us keep the core of Radiant tight and free of fluff.

What distinguishes Radiant from Other Rails CMS's (i.e .Typo, Mephisto, etc)?

Unlike Typo, Mephisto, El Dorado, and others, Radiant is a general-purpose CMS. Radiant doesn't aim to be portal software, nor a wiki, nor the best blogging software. You can create a blog with Radiant -- and many of our users do, myself included -- but you can also make a slick brochure website, or an art portfolio. Because there's few limitations on the ways to structure and manipulate content, you can make practically anything you want.

On the other hand, Radiant lacks a lot of the features that other CMS software provides; however, we tend to see this as a strength rather than a weakness. "Simplicity" is a core feature. If you need some feature Radiant doesn't have, we encourage you to build an extension to do it, or to seek out software that does it better.

What is the history of Radiant?

John Long, the original author, could answer this better, but I'll give it a shot. Radiant began in late 2005 as part of the redesign effort for the Ruby language homepage. After the identity team had designed the look and feel of the new site, they needed an elegant CMS upon which to build the site. Obviously, they preferred it be written with Ruby, and Rails was the new hotness at the time. Thus, Radiant was born. Ruby-Lang.org stands to this day as the longest running site on Radiant. It even survived the Slashdot effect following the release of The Ruby Way, 2nd edition.

The first public release of Radiant, version 0.5, was released in the spring of 2006. By September of 2006, 0.5.2 had been released and work began on the extension system, which debuted in version 0.6, about a month before RailsConf 2007. Since 0.6, we've been working on perfecting the extension system, upgraded the included version of Rails several times, and moved our test-suite over to RSpec. I expect we'll have the 0.7 release later this year, which will include a RESTful controller structure, a bunch of extensions to support blogging better, and a shiny new user-interface.

Can you give some examples of who is using Radiant?

There's a great page on the Radiant wiki that shows off sites created with Radiant.

Most notable lately has been its adoption by big companies and web development firms. For example, Digital Pulp and Saturn Flyer do most of their new site development with Radiant. Last year, I worked with Digital Pulp to launch their first Radiant sites, Redken.com and Redkensalon.com. This was a major accomplishment for them and for the Radiant software, liberating them from the dungeons of ezPublish, Drupal and Plone. Since releasing Redken, they have launched a number of others, including the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and have several others in the works. I'm currently on contract to help relaunch Con-way's corporate website with Radiant. Things are going well and we've been able to contribute back to the community many of the features we're building.

How did you get involved with it?

In June of 2006, I grew tired of my Blogger service. Specifically, I was fed up with how slow it was (even on Google's cloud!), how inflexible the design was, and how opaque the template language was. I had started developing applications with Rails in February 2006 and wanted something for my blog that was on Rails. I didn't have time to develop something myself and I had seen buzz about Radiant earlier in the spring, so I tried it out. Once I grokked the content model, I really liked its flexibility so I gave it a shot and relaunched my blog on SeanCribbs.com. Since launch it has gone through at least two design changes that were fairly painless, thanks to Radiant's transparent content model. In one case, it was as easy as changing the layout of the root page.

Over the summer of 2006, I got more and more familiar with Radiant as I was solving my own problems and learning tips and tricks from the mailing-list. I started answering questions on the list so often that John Long asked me to start blogging "How-To" posts on radiantcms.org. That fall, the team I worked with in my day job decided to use Radiant for a major site redesign, so I got started developing extensions (which were very nascent at the time) for that project. In the process, I submitted a few good patches and John asked me to join the core team in January of 2007. Because my involvement has remained high and John wanted to focus on aspects of the visual design, he gave me the role of Lead Developer at the beginning of this year. Now I'm responsible for the direction of the core code of Radiant and managing the release cycle.

What initially drew you to Radiant?

I think what most drew me most to Radiant was its flexibility. I could make a blog, but I could also make some static pages, and even create my CSS stylesheets or generate an RSS feed with the same tools. It really gets out of your way when you want to publish some textual content, while providing just enough tools to fight off tedium.

What's in the current roadmap for Radiant?

Radiant 0.7, which we're planning to release before 2009, is what we're calling the "blogging release". This will include extensions that support comments on every page, Web 2.0-like "tag" classifications, blogging APIs, and tools to import from other blogging software. Along with that release will be a fully RESTful internal controller architecture and a brand-spanking-new interface. Following the 0.7 series, we plan to support internationalization, assets/binary files, content versioning, and some drag-and-drop features, among others.

The interesting thing about the current release cycle and the roadmap is that many community members are already building these planned features because they need them. Part of the reason we're currently on 0.6.9 and not 0.7 yet is that the extension system has allowed developers in the community to build the things they need and not affect the core Radiant code. In some areas, the community is moving faster than the core.

How can other people get involved with the development of Radiant?

The first step is to get on the mailing lists, which can be found from the Radiant website. Ask questions, answer questions, get your name into the community.

Second, build some sites with Radiant. Share your tips, tricks, tweaks, and code with the community.

Third, follow and contribute to the project. Since late spring 2008, main development has been done with git on GitHub. In June, the project moved completely over to GitHub in its own account -- http://github.com/radiant. The account includes the core 'radiant', a number of sub-projects like the UI prototype and mockups, and a bevy of extensions that were authored originally by members of the dev team.
While I act as gatekeeper for the core, we're very open to adding other developers to help maintain the extensions -- the "one patch gives commit bits" applies there. We only ask that your patches and pull-requests be clean, unobtrusive, and well-tested (with RSpec). Since moving to GitHub, we've nearly abandoned our existing Trac installation because most changes come to me through pull-requests. If you're not yet on GitHub, *you should be*.

Can you tell us more about the sprint weekend that you're planning?

In the recent past, I've noticed big-name projects in the Ruby community take on "sprint" weekends to hack out a lot of code (Rubinius, for example). Since we have some significant ground to cover before 0.7, I thought a hack-a-thon like that would be beneficial. Over the past few weeks, I ran online survey to collect a bunch of responses from community members who want to participate. While the details haven't been solidified yet, it will probably be in the Raleigh-Durham area (North Carolina, USA) in late October.

There are also a bunch of people who have been bugging me about holding a Radiant-focused conference, so there's another survey up to get information about that. You can find the survey linked from the Radiant blog, and the survey is open until mid-September. If we hold a Radiant conference, it will most likely happen in 2009, given how little of 2008 is left.

Post supported by thoughtbot — thoughtbot is a five year old web development consultancy, specializing exclusively in Ruby since Rails 1.0. We now provide an Advanced Rails training class, sharing our lessons from the trenches and interactively taking participants through the source and development process of a real-world app, Umbrella Today.

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