Day Two with Radiant
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Radiant uses extensions to, as the name suggests, extend the functionality of the CMS. These extensions can be found on, but no limited to the Extension Registry. If the extension you would like to use is found in the registry, you’ll be able to use the built-in script to install it. Otherwise, you will have to use the manual installation process. You can find more information about how to install and uninstall extensions on the wiki.
For this demo I am building a conference site and awesomely enough there is an extension for that. The extension that I will look at is called, appropriately, Conferences. If you look at the Conferences Extension GitHub Repo you will see in the README file that there are some dependencies that you need to install before getting to the extension itself. There isn’t any information on how to get those dependencies installed so follow along with these instructions:
# Install the fastercsv gem
sudo gem install fastercsv
Download the file_column plugin into the vendor/plugins directory and if you are using a Rails version earlier than 2.1 you will need to do the following as well:
# Install the tzinfo_timezone plugin and tzinfo gem
sudo gem install tzinfo
git clone git://github.com/rails/tzinfo_timezone.git vendor/plugins/tzinfo_timezone
Then continue installing the extensions:
# Install the members extension
./script/extension install members
# Install the tinymce_filter extension
./script/extension install tiny_mce_filter
mv vendor/extensions/tiny_mce_filter/ vendor/extensions/tinymce_filter/
rake radiant:extensions:tinymce_filter:update
Notice that we had to rename the folder for the tiny_mce_filter extension because of naming error and then rerun the update manually. Now you are ready to install the conferences extension:
./script/extension install conferences
ActionMailer spits out an error in the current settings, to fix it we must install the plugin and the extension:
# Install the Action Mailer & TLS plugin
git clone git://github.com/collectiveidea/action_mailer_optional_tls.git vendor/plugins/action_mailer_optional_tls/
# Install the mailer extension
./script/extension install mailer
To see the changes make sure you restart the server. If you navigate to the extensions page from the admin panel you will see the list of extensions installed.
You will also notice the new tabs that are now available for you (Submissions, Conferences, Profile).
And if you navigate to the “Conferences” tab you will see all the configuration options and links to create new conferences. Enjoy!
Installing this one extension has honestly been a pain. I had to dig around to figure out what the dependencies were and how to solve some of the problems like the ActionMailer error and the renaming of the tiny_mce_filter forlder. I hope installing other extensions is not as difficult as this one. The documentation for the extensions is lacking, even though the documentation for Radiant itself seems to be good so far. I have been on the Radiant mailing list for a while and I have seen a good response time and a lot of people willing to answer questions, so that might the best resort for help. On this note I conclude Day Two with Radiant.