Fun With Radiant

Radiant 0.8.0 - Asterism Release

Sean — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:34:43 GMT

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

Many thanks to our contributors and committers for their contributions.

Installation

To install use the gem command (with ‘sudo’ as necessary):

$ gem install radiant

Upgrading an existing project/site

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.8.0” or remove it altogether.

2. Update the Radiant assets in your project:

rake radiant:update

3. Copy your customizations back into config/environment.rb, if necessary.

4. Migrate the database:

rake production db:migrate

5. Restart the server

Creating a new project/site

1. Invoke the radiant command with your desired database driver:

$ radiant -d sqlite3 my_project

2. Bootstrap the database:

$ cd my_project
$ rake db:bootstrap

3. Startup the server and try it out!

$ script/server

Developer Tips: ResponseCache and Radiant::Cache

Jim — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:35:44 GMT

If you’re looking to test out your site on edge to prepare for the next release but aren’t ready to take the plunge, you can alter your environments to selectively set up ResponseCache

if defined? ResponseCache == 'constant'
  ResponseCache.defaults[:perform_caching] = true
end

You may also set the cache_timeout for SiteController which will stand in the place of ResponseCache.defaults[:expire_time]

config.after_initialize do
  ...
  if defined? ResponseCache == 'constant'
    ResponseCache.defaults[:expire_time] = 12.hours
  else
    SiteController.cache_timeout = 12.hours
  end
  ...
end

That should get you going as you kick the tires on 0.8.

If you’re looking for more control, take a look at the source and know that Radiant::Cache is now implemented in Rack::Cache and of course, keep your eye on the wiki page for developer upgrades

New Wiki Page: Developer Upgrade Notes

Sean — Tue, 12 May 2009 13:08:24 GMT

ATTENTION EXTENSION DEVELOPERS! When working to upgrade your extensions to be compatible with the latest Radiant, please refer to and update this new wiki page: Developer Upgrade Notes. I’d like to make this a one-stop-shop for inter-version upgrade questions. Do not put information on individual extensions here, but on upgrade issues in the general sense. Things that will go well in the page:

Class/method/namespace changes
Common errors and how to resolve them
Library/API additions and modifications
New conventions, deprecated conventions

Start preparing your extensions for Radiant 0.8 as soon as you can!

Radiant 0.8.0-RC1 Available

Sean — Mon, 11 May 2009 21:42:38 GMT

Hot on the heels of the feature list from this morning is Release Candidate 1 of Radiant 0.8.0.

Download the gem from S3.

The gem will install as radiant-0.8.0.

Missing from the promised feature list in this release candidate are:

Support for cucumber features in extensions — sorry, you’ll have to rig something up yourself for now.
Packaged assets in DB templates – Roasters is due for this enhancement.

This release is intended for developers and the brave only! A production-ready release should be available later in the month. Please use this release to test the new features and discover bugs.

What's Coming in Radiant 0.8

Sean — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:11:03 GMT

The dev team has been working hard at preparing the next version of Radiant, which we believe will be ready later this month. Here’s an overview of the upcoming changes:

Rails 2.3.2 is bundled – this includes support for Rack, so you can add your own “metal” or “middleware”, making certain tasks much easier and performant.
The integration specs are now Cucumber stories, and you will be able to write Cucumber stories in your extensions.
RSpec and friends are only required to run tests and will no longer be install-time gem dependencies. Rake tasks that depend on them are stubbed.
config.extensions will be pre-populated so you can easily turn off installed extensions like so: config.extensions -= [:archive]
ResponseCache, Radiant’s built-in caching, has been replaced by Radiant::Cache, which wraps Rack::Cache with some enhancements for manual expiration and acceleration headers. This makes us more compliant with the HTTP/1.1 spec and removes some of the complexity of that code. Best of all, it’s completely pluggable, so you can use plain Rack::Cache or turn it off altogether in one line.
Admin::AbstractModelController is no more. Use Admin::ResourceController!

Some efforts that are started but will not finish until after 0.8 release:

Internationalization of the interface has begun in the i18n branch, lead by Keith Bingman.
The new “blade” interface is nearly complete, John says. Check it out in the prototype

Radiant Birds-of-Feather Session at RailsConf

Sean — Mon, 04 May 2009 13:12:59 GMT

If you are at RailsConf 2009, please consider attending the Radiant BoF Session, which will be moderated by the awesome Keith Bingman, developer of bitchkittyracing and leader of the i18n effort for Radiant. John and Sean might also make an appearance remotely via Skype or IRC, so bring your questions, problems and comments!

Radiant Hack Day - April 25, 2009

Sean — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:16:55 GMT

You’re invited to another Radiant Hack Day/Sprint!

What: Radiant Hack Day
When: Saturday, April 25th, 10:00AM-? EDT
Where: Carrboro Creative Coworking 205 Lloyd St, Suite 101 Carrboro, NC, 27510 carrborocoworking.com

Both John and Sean will be in attendance, leading the design/UI and development pieces respectively. This is an easy way to get started contributing to the project, learn more about Radiant, or to work on your own feature with guidance from the community. We’re going lower ceremony than our big one in October, but still encourage out-of-towners to come. Contact Sean privately via email if you need help making arrangements to attend, or if you’d like to be involved remotely.

Happy hacking!

If you can attend, please RSVP.

Radiant Wiki Moves to Github

Sean — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:35:03 GMT

Thanks to Steven Southard and John Muhl, we have moved the majority of the existing wiki over to Github. We encourage you to start contributing to the wiki there. You will need a Github account to participate.

NOTE: In an attempt to place this notice on the old wiki, Junebug failed for us again. AVLUX attempted to help me with this, but we were unable to resurrect it. If you need access to an old page on the wiki, please refer to the file made available on the mailing list.

Radiant Gets Some Love From Heroku

Jim — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:11:08 GMT

Over at the Heroku blog, Morten has written up some details about using their “instant ruby platform” to get running on Radiant with a tip on how to get around their read-only file system.

Happy content-managing!

Developer Tips: Cold Deployment

Jim — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 11:23:12 GMT

Have you ever needed to bootstrap an installation of Radiant on your production server with Capistrano, Vlad, or some other method?

You may have thought that you couldn’t because the rake db:bootstrap task requires some user input (such as username and password for the administrator). If you have, you’ve been wrong.

Take a look at the code:


namespace :db do
  desc "Migrate schema to version 0 and back up again. WARNING: Destroys all data in tables!!" 
  task :remigrate => :environment do
    require 'highline/import'
    if ENV['OVERWRITE'].to_s.downcase == 'true' or agree("This task will destroy any data in the database. Are you sure you want to \ncontinue? [yn] ")

      # Migrate downward
      ActiveRecord::Migrator.migrate("#{RADIANT_ROOT}/db/migrate/", 0)

      # Migrate upward 
      Rake::Task["db:migrate"].invoke

      # Dump the schema
      Rake::Task["db:schema:dump"].invoke
    else
      say "Task cancelled." 
      exit
    end
  end

  desc "Bootstrap your database for Radiant." 
  task :bootstrap => :remigrate do
    require 'radiant/setup'
    Radiant::Setup.bootstrap(
      :admin_name => ENV['ADMIN_NAME'],
      :admin_username => ENV['ADMIN_USERNAME'],
      :admin_password => ENV['ADMIN_PASSWORD'],
      :database_template => ENV['DATABASE_TEMPLATE']
    )
  end
end

If any of those ENV stand out at you, you might realize that you can easily do something like:

rake db:bootstrap ADMIN_NAME='Admin' ADMIN_USERNAME='admin' ...etc...

Personally, however, if I do an automated bootstrap I then remove the task from my deployment recipe so that it can’t happen again and wipe out all my work.