Last night I quietly rolled out the first official release of Radiant: 0.5 - Grindstone. This release was a stability release mostly targeted toward making it easy for people to download and get started with Radiant. Radiant now ships with a simple setup_database script which makes it easy to get up and running with one of three default templates. We also made it easy for people to install Radiant via Ruby Gems. WHAT IS RADIANT CMS? Radiant is a no-fluff content management system designed for small teams. It''s similar to Movable Type or Textpattern, but is more than a blogging engine. It''s a Web developer''s CMS with just enough features to make it worthwhile. We''ve intentionally left the kitchen sink out! Radiant features: * 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: http://radius.rubyforge.org) * 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 * And much more... There''s even a live demo over on the project Web site: http://radiantcms.org/demo/ INSTALLATION We''ve worked hard to make it easy to install Radiant. For starters you can download it with Ruby Gems: % gem install --include-dependencies radiant Once the Radiant gem is installed you have access to the `radiant` command. The `radiant` command is similar to the `rails` command (if you are from the Rails world. It''s how you generate a new Radiant instance application. An instance application is an application that references the source code which is located somewhere else (in this case the Radiant gem.) So `cd` to the directory where you would like your instance to be installed and type: % radiant . Next create a database for your application and setup the appropriate config/database.yml file. You''ll find several examples in the config directory. Radiant supports MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL. Then run the `script/setup_database` command: % script/setup_database production And start up the test server: % script/server Finally, hit the /admin/ URL and you should be off to the races. See the README file in the release for additional details. If you are interested in other download options, visit the download page: http://radiantcms.org/download/. CONTRIBUTORS Radiant wouldn''t be possible without the help of some fine people. The following people have made contributions to this release: * Matt McCray * Paul Smith * Scott Walter * Sven Lauer * Tristan Boniver * Chris Corriveau * Ryan Platte * Luis Lavena Thanks guys! If you''d like to hop on the development band wagon head on over to our dev site (http://dev.radiantcms.org/). SUPPORT Perhaps the best place to get support is on the Radiant mailing list. There''s a crowd of people there who have been hanging around for over a month now. Newbie questions are welcome! To sign up, go to: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/ Enjoy! -- John Long http://wiseheartdesign.com http://radiantcms.org