Radiant (software)

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Radiant
Developed by	John W. Long
Latest release	0.6.4 / 2007-11-10
OS	Cross-platform
Platform	Ruby on Rails
Genre	Content management system
License	MIT
Website	www.radiantcms.org

Radiant is a free-software content management system written in Ruby by John W. Long as a Ruby on Rails web application.

Radiant is limited to basic functionality for a CMS. The intended users are small groups or teams and thus the software leaves much room for extensions. All the content is stored inside a database. It's possible to use MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite. Radiant depends, like every Ruby on Rails application, on the installed adapters for the database.

An independent review of Radiant was conducted by Frederic BRUNEL, who is a software architect and a technology enthusiast. His review is available at[1]

It's distributed via a separate download or installable with RubyGems.

[edit] Design

Radiant projects are based on 3 elements: Pages, Snippets and Layouts. ^[1]

Pages: The content of every page is stored in Pages. Every page has specific attributes and content. For example, if Radiant is used as a blog, all blog entries are Pages inside the Radiant system. They can be arranged hierarchically to reflect the actual structure of the content.

Snippets: Snippets are essentially just small parts of code that can be reused everywhere in the project and make Page creation easier.

Layouts: To define the general look of a Page Layouts are used. Upon Page creation, a layout can be attached to that Page to define a frame for this Page to be inserted in.

[edit] Radius Template Language

Inside a Page, Layout or Snippet, Radiant offers special template tags, called Radius Tags, to easily access parameters, loop through content or make conditional checks.

Radius tags are XML tags that start with an r:

Radius tags inside a radiant layout:

<html>
 <head><r:title /></head>
 <body>
  <r:snippet name="header"/>
  <r:children:each limit="2">
   <r:content />
   <r:if_content part="sidebar">
    <div class="sidebar">
     <r:content part="sidebar" />
    </div>
   </r:if_content>
  <r:snippet name="footer" />
 </body>
</html>