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Radiant 0.8.0 - Asterism Release Sean

Sunday, June 14, 2009 | |

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:

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

Monday, June 08, 2009 | |

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

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 | |

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:

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

Radiant 0.8.0-RC1 Available Sean

Monday, May 11, 2009 | |

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:

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

Monday, May 11, 2009 | |

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:

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

Radiant Birds-of-Feather Session at RailsConf Sean

Monday, May 04, 2009 | |

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

Friday, April 17, 2009 | |

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

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

Thursday, April 09, 2009 | |

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

Friday, March 27, 2009 | |

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

Wednesday, March 18, 2009 | |

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.

Developer Tips: Scenarios and Datasets Jim

Tuesday, March 10, 2009 | |

You may have the need to update specs for your extension if you had been using the Scenarios plugin that came with Radiant.

Recent changes to Radiant moved from the Scenarios plugin to the new rewrite as the Dataset plugin. For great information about the thinking behind the move to Datasets, check out John Long’s post.

If you’re working with your extension and your specs no longer run because of an error like:

../../activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:279:in `load_missing_constant': uninitialized constant Scenario (NameError)

That means that you’ll either need to add back the Scenarios plugin, or just alter some code to use Datasets.

Your existing spec/spec_helper.rb might have something like

if File.directory?(File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/scenarios")
  Scenario.load_paths.unshift File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/scenarios" 
end

You’ll need to change that to

Dataset::Resolver.default << (File.dirname(__FILE__) + "/datasets")

And your specs load your scenarios with scenario :users. You’ll just need to change that to dataset :users. Here’s an example from the site_watcher extension

Developer Tips 2 Jim

Tuesday, February 24, 2009 | |

Working on building that great extension to track widgets, doodads and thingamajigs? You’ll probably need a way to keep track of who created and updated what.

Radiant takes care of tracking the creator and updater of pages, snippets, layouts and even users with the UserActionObserver so perhaps there’s a way to use that in your own quest to track whatchamacallits.

The UserActionObserver is loaded in your config/environment.rb with config.active_record.observers = :user_action_observer

You could create your own observer and add that to your environment with config.active_record.observers = :user_action_observer, :gizmo_observer. The UserActionObserver looks like this:


class UserActionObserver < ActiveRecord::Observer
  observe User, Page, Layout, Snippet

  cattr_accessor :current_user

  def before_create(model)
    model.created_by = @@current_user
  end

  def before_update(model)
    model.updated_by = @@current_user
  end
end

You could go right ahead and make that GizmoObserver that you need, but if you only need to perform the same function as the UserActionObserver why not make your life easier and use what’s already there.

Here’s how Radiant set’s up the relationships in the observed models:


  belongs_to :created_by, :class_name => 'User'
  belongs_to :updated_by, :class_name => 'User'

That’s simple enough to repeat in your extension. Just add created_by_id and updated_by_id fields to your appropriate table and setup the same relationships.

Once you’ve done that, the last step is simple: just update your whatever_extension.rb


  def activate
    ...
    UserActionObserver.instance.send :add_observer!, DooHickey
    ...
  end

There are other extensions out there that already do this, so if you need to see it in action, check out their code.

Developer Tips Jim

Tuesday, February 17, 2009 | |

I thought I’d start writing about interesting bits about developing for Radiant that some of you might not know about.

First off, Radiant::Config:

You can see examples of the standard configuration options that Radiant uses and you’ll find an oft overlooked option page.edit.published_date?.

By setting this to true, you will have the option of changing the published date for each page when creating or editing. There’s even a wiki page about the page published_at date.

Even more interesting about it is that for developers, this is an example of how to return a boolean value from the configuration options, not just a string that is “true” or “false”.


    def value
      if key.ends_with? "?" 
        read_attribute(:value) == "true" 
      else
        read_attribute(:value)
      end
    end

Here’s the source

A popular extension for managing configuration options is the Settings extension. It will prevent users from seeing the values of configuration options containing the phrase “password”. While this is only a way to hide the details from typical users and not a secure way to store important passwords, it may be just enough for you. Here’s the code that does it:


module ConfigProtection
  def protected?
    key.match(/[p|P]assword/)
  end

  def protected_value
    if protected?
      return "********" 
    else
      return value
    end
  end
end

It’s good enough for something like the Twitter extension (github)

Here are some other tips about altering the configuration options: http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Customizations_II

Radiant 0.7.1 - Engraving Release (bugfixes) Sean

Sunday, February 15, 2009 | |

Radiant 0.7.1 Engraving is a bugfix release that corrects two errors in the user-interface. The contents of page-parts will now maintain escaped HTML characters across saves, and the tag reference will now properly display when ’<normal>’ is selected as the page type. The spec-suite was expanded to cover these regressions. Many thanks to John Muhl for identifying the escaping issue and a number of other community members for diagnosing the tag reference issue.

Installation

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

$ gem install radiant
Upgrading an existing project/site from 0.7.x

1. Update the Radiant gem:

% gem update radiant

2. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.7.1”.

3. Restart the server

Upgrading an existing project/site from 0.6.5 – 0.6.9

1. Change the RADIANT_GEM_VERSION constant in config/environment.rb to “0.7.1” 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

Upgrading an existing project/site from 0.5.x – 0.6.4

The upgrade process changed significantly from last release, so listen up! To upgrade an existing installation, BACKUP YOUR DATABASE, update the gem, and create a new Radiant project using the instructions above. Then point Radiant to the right database by editing config/database.yml and execute the following command in your project directory:

% rake db:migrate

If you have problems during the upgrade, please let us know.

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

Radiant 0.7.0 - Intaglio Release (final) Sean

Saturday, February 07, 2009 | |

Radiant 0.7.0 “Intaglio” culminates six months of refactoring and bug- fixing by a dedicated team of contributors. The major milestone crossed with this release is that the admin controllers have been refactored toward Rails’ RESTful design. In addition, these changes are of note:

There were over 80 changes to this release! A big thank you goes to all of the sprint weekend attendees and hack night contributors. Well done!

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 “0.7.0” 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
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