First off, what I have done so far in Radiant has been pretty inspiring.
I usually hate CMS solutions due to their inflexibility. The super
simple Radiant extension is a huge selling point for me. I intend to
use a Radiant install as the base for projects since it gives me
publishing, admin authentication, and admin architecture for almost no
effort. I’m pretty experienced with Rails, but new to Radiant.
Maintaining layouts and snippets in the admin interface via text area is
so much less fun than editing these things in Textmate. My current
workflow is to use the “It’s all text” Firefox plugin to edit text area
contents in Textmate. It’s not so bad, but I have switch to the browser
and press the save button, then switch to my tab with the radiant app
and refresh to see my changes. Its far more tedious than the usual
cmd-s, cmd-tab, F5 I’m used to. Page content would change far more
frequently and is a good fit for the database, in my opinion. Plus the
regular, non-technical, maintainers of the site probably shouldn’t have
access to changing layouts and snippets anyway.
So, I am looking for a way to store site structure files in the file
system, version controlled and in a higher level template language like
erb or haml. Then store page content in the database in radius format
just like normal.
Is there an extension for that? Or is that even a good idea?
Thanks for the great tool,
-Alex
Alex,
I’ve been promising for a long time, so I better own up on it. I wrote
an extension for Digital Pulp that lets you import/export several models
between the database and the file system so that they can be stored in a
SCM. There are a number of other extensions that the DP devs and I have
been wanting to export for a while. Although I have a few other things
to do this Friday, I’ll put that on the to-dos as well.
Sean
Sean C. wrote:
Alex,
I’ve been promising for a long time, so I better own up on it. I wrote
an extension for Digital Pulp that lets you import/export several models
between the database and the file system so that they can be stored in a
SCM. There are a number of other extensions that the DP devs and I have
been wanting to export for a while. Although I have a few other things
to do this Friday, I’ll put that on the to-dos as well.
Sean
Firstly, I realize I am in no position to demand anything!
I have been watching the git repo and the blog, and haven’t seen
anything about this. Any progress that i missed?
Thanks.
Sean C. wrote:
Alex,
I’ve been promising for a long time, so I better own up on it. I wrote
an extension for Digital Pulp that lets you import/export several models
between the database and the file system so that they can be stored in a
SCM. There are a number of other extensions that the DP devs and I have
been wanting to export for a while. Although I have a few other things
to do this Friday, I’ll put that on the to-dos as well.
Sean
Rock on. Thank you, I will keep an ear out!
In parallel, it would be nice to add another basic user-level of
“Designer”, for managing Snippets - in the absence of SCM/file support
for layouts/partials.
In keeping designs and code DRY, we find ourselves using snippets to
contain more than user-editable content, and use them heavily for
fragments of design logic. As such, we want to keep day-to-day users far
away from anything that can cause damage to the site.
Standard (Pages) -> Designer (+ Snippets) -> Administrator (+ Layouts,
Users, etc)
Does the Developer flag do anything in production mode?
Thanks,
Jon.
Sean C. wrote:
Alex,
I’ve been promising for a long time, so I better own up on it. I wrote
an extension for Digital Pulp that lets you import/export several models
between the database and the file system so that they can be stored in a
SCM. There are a number of other extensions that the DP devs and I have
been wanting to export for a while. Although I have a few other things
to do this Friday, I’ll put that on the to-dos as well.
Sean
Was this done via FUSE?
http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/railsfsAfterACoupleMinutesOfToolingWithFuseWhoa.html
Seems like that’s the “Right” way. I’ve used FUSE extensively to mount
remote filesystems via SSH and it works wonderfully.
–DJCP
Jonathan McCoy wrote:
settings.
You just described the file_system extension written for Redken to a T.
I would like to release it but I’m not ready to support it yet or to
detox the code.
Sean
Daniel Collis-puro wrote:
Was this done via FUSE?
http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/railsfsAfterACoupleMinutesOfToolingWithFuseWhoa.html
Seems like that’s the “Right” way. I’ve used FUSE extensively to mount
remote filesystems via SSH and it works wonderfully.
–DJCP
Highly unlikely. FUSE is a modular file system API - basically a simple
means to build your own file system without actually having to do
anything majorly complex. Although yes, what you linked to would be a
cool solution - it still lacks version control. You’d also have to make
it uber-bespoke to Radiant, and to each model in the Radiant schema,
otherwise you’ll be working with YAML etc. If somebody did build a FUSE
interface for Radiant, it would be nice if each page is represented by a
folder, with files corresponding to each page part, with the extension
being the filter used. A meta file could contain the overall page
settings.
eg:
/welcome/ (path is slug)
/welcome/page.meta (YAML settings for page)
/welcome/body.textile
/welcome/extended.smartypants
/welcome/extended.html (plain/non-filtered)
and so forth…
The real goal here however, is to allow layouts and partials to exist in
the filesystem (within the ‘app/view’ folder structure), which
immediately allows you to use an SCM (SVN, CVS, GIT etc) either for the
whole project, or as an SVN External (or GIT/CVS equivalent). My
preference would be to allow both file system and DB based
layouts/snippets to co-exist, with file system layouts taking precedence
in case of name clashes. It’d be great to use HAML as well. I’d also
add, support for Multi-Site would be highly desired.
Jon.
Gah! Shafted again! How long you gonna keep these awesome extensions
under your wings? What detoxing needs to be done?
Sean C. wrote:
Jonathan McCoy wrote:
settings.
You just described the file_system extension written for Redken to a T.
I would like to release it but I’m not ready to support it yet or to
detox the code.
Sean
Jonathan McCoy wrote:
In parallel, it would be nice to add another basic user-level of
“Designer”, for managing Snippets - in the absence of SCM/file support
for layouts/partials.
In keeping designs and code DRY, we find ourselves using snippets to
contain more than user-editable content, and use them heavily for
fragments of design logic. As such, we want to keep day-to-day users far
away from anything that can cause damage to the site.
Standard (Pages) -> Designer (+ Snippets) -> Administrator (+ Layouts,
Users, etc)
Does the Developer flag do anything in production mode?
Thanks,
Jon.
I’ve monkey-patched a frozen version of Radiant (0.6.7) with some of the
functionality I lusted for above. No testing or a “designer” flag (just
put snippets on the Admin/Dev level). I’d be more inclined to assemble
patches and tests (to the spec above) if anybody else was interested in
it being pushed into the trunk?
Would be nice to review the user levels available - or if we’re all
feeling code-happy, granular access control. I can foresee the need for
the following roles at least:
- Content Monkey (pages + preferences)
- Designer (+ layouts + snippets)
- Developer (+ extensions)
- Administrator (+ user management)
In hindsight to my previous post, I’d keep the developer flag for the
benefit of extensions/plugins that need technical setup. Another
question, is whether flags are more desirable than a user-level number
(ie 1 to 4) or even a class-name, which can be mapped out to a role
name. A popup list with userlevels can be used instead. It removes the
uncertainty of having admin flagged, but developer unflagged -> what
rights does the user have?!
I am having trouble finding where the user-level is set for the tab
display - I’ve traced back through all the libraries, but can’t seem to
find (or rather see) where snippets (or rather other admin/dev tabs) are
set…
Cheers,
Jon.
On 14 Jun 2008, at 18:51, Sean C. wrote:
to each page part, with the extension being the filter used. A meta
file could contain the overall page settings.
You just described the file_system extension written for Redken to a
T. I would like to release it but I’m not ready to support it yet
or to detox the code.
I asked Sean if I could have a go at detoxing his code myself. I’ve
stripped out all of the Redken specific functionality, and got the
extension working on a vanilla Radiant site (i.e. with no other
extensions). Here it is:
GitHub - nelstrom/radiant-file-system-extension: Save a Radiant site to the file system for easy editing and/or version control. Load from file system back into the database
I’d be happy to hear any feedback.
Cheers,
Drew
Sean C. wrote:
Jonathan McCoy wrote:
settings.
You just described the file_system extension written for Redken to a T.
I would like to release it but I’m not ready to support it yet or to
detox the code.
Sean
Nice!
My next mission is to design/build a platform for content delivery (the
binary kind) - basically a front end for managing content (videos,
images, PDF’s etc), engines to maintain and distribute the content
(faux-RAID), and a delivery mechanism (caching HTTP app). Keen to find a
solution using Radiant, but failing that will build a plugin for the
integration.
Jon.
Nice work, Andrew. I wonder how hard it would to get this extension to
also dump and load SnS text assets. Not that any of the extensions
should have a dependency on the other, but the file-system-extension
could perhaps check for the presence of SnS and dump that too, if
present?
Cheers,
Casper
When I designed the extension, I toyed with the idea of providing a way
for extensions to specify how to dump/load their own models. IIRC, you
can just create an appropriately named module and then add the model to
the constant array in the FileSystem module. You should probably do all
of that in your extension file.
Sean