Ruby Forum Radiant CMS > Calling radiant layouts, from external rails app

Many posts are already appeared about integrating radiant and rails
distinct apps,
anyway here my needs are simpler: run them in parallel and call the
radiant layout ( snippets, layouts and pages ) from the other rails app
embedding the radiant views components. What is the better way to go ?

For what I've understood about Creating_an_extension_VI tutorial, the
share_layouts extension is installed inside "Radiant app" and permits to
call radiant_layout 'Normal' within the new extention controller, which
means to me, "not outside radiant".

Is that possible calling the radiant_layout from an external rails app?
Are there
other plugins to have a look ?

I've also thought to dump the layout on the file system via
"file_system_extension" that produce a ~/radiant_app/design/layouts,
pages and snippets dir tree. Then point the rails app to the radiant
design dumped filesystem to load.

Untill now I "get the job done" by hacking css, erb and partials
manually into the rails app, but I'm looking for a cleaner, manageable
and dry way.

Do you please know a better way to go ?
thz in advance
lgs

You could conceivably pull the Radiant layout into your other app, but
it's not going to get you much without the parsing framework of
Radiant.  The Radius tags embedded in the layout are very specific to
Radiant's content model and you would spend a lot of time parsing or
modifying them to work in your Rails app.  The point of share_layouts is
to bridge the gap between custom Rails functionality and Radiant's
parsing framework; the tradeoff is that your Rails stuff should be
created as an extension to Radiant.  I believe you'll find that you
won't lose much if you choose to do that.  Your other option is to
maintain separate layouts for your Rails app and for your Radiant
installation.

Sean

What about the past try to pluginize radiant? I saw some old posts about 
mini_radiant plugin, RadiantOnRails and others, but they all seems to be 
died actually. Should be great to get a light radiant plugin or engine 
for classic rails, to add on complex preexisting backend rails 
application. I rally would like to be able to produce new layouts, 
sneppets and pages to that complex backend the same way I'm actually 
doing with Radiant (hoping that should speed up refactoring and 
maintenance).

The share_layouts tradeoff is now clear to me and seems very powerful 
and promising for new dinamic extension which is projected from scratch, 
but in my case I really would need to integrate an OpenID server to the 
CMS (masquerade).

I've a successful try with Comatose, but Radiant is clean, easy and 
powerful and two things really turn me on about that:  extensions and 
layout management.

I also tryed to port masquerade into radiant extension, but until now, 
without any success.

Do you think could it be of some interest to anyone porting an identity 
server to a Radiant extension 
(http://github.com/dbloete/masquerade/tree/master)?

In case, I'll share my steps and see if someone get some ideas to pass 
on my first failures.

thz
lgs