Comparing version 8 and version 7
hi:::Radiant is a fairly friendly, easy to use and customize content management system. However, it does require some knowlege of its innards in order to be able to take full advantage of its relative simplicity and elegance. h2. Pages, Layouts and Snippets In this section we'll attempt to expound and clarify some of the most elementary, yet crucial features of "Radiant CMS":http://radiantcms.org. h3. Pages A page represents a single HTML, CSS, Javascript or any other single file in your website. In the Radiant microcosm, a page can also be thought of as a container, it will contain a layout, snippets, styles and so forth (all of which will be explained below). If you're the visual type, you can think of a page as being one of the branches (which is a tree in its own right) that stems directly off the root (i.e. your home page) of your site tree. As of this writing, by far the easiest way to create a page is through the administrative interface. There, it is as simple as adding a child (the plus sign) to the root of your site (which should be at the very top of the page list). Once you have an empty page it's really up to you whether you want to use dynamic content (using radius tags), if you want have a special layout for this page, or if you just wish to dump your static HTML inside the page. h3. Layouts A layout is the outer shell or skeleton for a page. A layout will typically include the HTML elements that are the same from page to page for a group of similar pages in your site. A simple site might have a single layout. More complex sites can have multiple layouts to support different page configurations. For example you could have a 2-column layout for your inner pages, 3-column layout for your front/home page, etc. Typically a layout will be paired with one or more CSS stylesheet files which, by default, are stored in the DB as a page! (see above). Another way to think about Layouts is to think of them as the underlying "physical" infrastructure of your page. They bear little or no content (ideally none at all), they simply tell the page where to place the different elements the page contains. h3. Snippets As their name implies, snippets are short pieces or parts of a page that contain little content and are used throughout different pages of your site. You can think of them as server-side include files; that is, parts that change little and belong to the site as a whole (i.e. footers, headers, perhaps a static or semi-static navigation bar, etc.). They're often used in layouts, though there is no reason not to use them from within pages. h2. Hierarchical Organization Radiant is organized in a very intuitive and structured way. If you're a developer, you should be familiar with the term *tree*, and should readily notice from the organization within the administrative interface that Radiant forms an n-branch tree (the root being the main or home page of the site). If you're not familiar with tree structures or terminology, the easiest way to _see_ this is to think of an upside-down tree (i.e. root at the top, branches and leaves at the bottom). At the very top of the tree, is the root (which as said above is the site's main or home page), from it you can spawn *children* (that is, branches of the tree). Please don't think of children as their own entity: they are fully dependent on their parent. But just as it is the case in nature, branches themselves can have children, and this children can, of course, have children of their own. Children who do not have children are usually referred to as *leaf nodes* (for obvious reasons). You can also see it from the URL perspective: Also, as you might already suspect, if you delete a node, you are, in effect deleting *all* of its children, its children's children, and so forth. Radiant is very careful in this sense and will prompt you when you're attempting to delete nodes. Just as in programming languages, once you leave a node orphan, you cannot retrieve it or re-attach it to the tree--it's gone too. h2. Page Editing h3. Sections h3. Filtering h2. Behavior h2. Radius tags h2. Comments << "Installation":http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Installation | "Using Radiant":http://wiki.radiantcms.org/Using_Radiant >>
