Radiant: A Ruby CMS and PHP alternative

So far I've mostly posted here at CMS Report about PHP-based content management systems. However, PHP isn't the only language being used on the Web. Other Web friendly languages include Perl, Java, Ruby, ASP, Python, etc.

So for one of our first non-PHP based CMS we're going to take a look at Radiant. The Radiant CMS is a Ruby on Rails CMS that has yet to reach version 1.0. Like a lot of CMS in early development it is considered a "no fluff" CMS for small teams. In other words, Radiant is not quite ready for enterprise level work. Radiant however may work well for those personal sites and small companies that have an invested interest to promote Ruby on Rails based applications.

Current features of Radiant, according to its home Website, include:

  • An elegant user interface
  • The ability to arrange pages in a hierarchy
  • Flexible templating with layouts, snippets, page parts, and a custom tagging language (Radius)
  • Special page-oriented plugins called behaviors
  • A simple user management/permissions system
  • Support for Markdown and Textile as well as traditional HTML (it's easy to create other filters)
  • Operates in two modes: dev and production depending on the URL
  • A caching system which expires pages every 5 minutes
  • Built using Ruby on Rails (which means that extending Radiant is as easy as any other Rails application)
  • Licensed under the MIT license