I don’t usually work on “plain old websites”, but I had an itch to try out “Radiant CMS”:http://radiantcms.org, and so I decided to take a small gig building a showcase site for a real estate developer (or property developer, depending on which side of the pond you’re on).
So far Radiant has been a pleasant experience and I’ll definitely use it for a couple of other sites. Initially my impression was that it had way too few features to be of any real use, but it has the 20% features that you use 80% of the time. For the rest there’s a bunch of extensions, some which are almost mandatory for any site, like the page_attachments extension, that enables file-uploads on all pages. Also, Radiant is based on “Rails”:http://rubyonrails.org/, so if you can’t find an extension with the functionality you need it can be easily extended.
Working with Radiant also gave me a chance to look into Rails hosting options in Europe. Most of the dedicated Rails hosting companies have data centers in the US, so I needed to look elsewhere. I ended up hosting the site on a VPS from “RimuHosting”:http://rimuhosting.com, who have a data center in London. They don’t specifically promote themselves as a Rails host, but they do have “instructions for running Rails on their servers”:http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/miscapplications/ruby+on+rails and they will install a complete Rails stack for you if you just ask when ordering the VPS. Setup was a amazingly fast even though it involved a real person handling my order. Within 15 minutes of submitting the order I had an email back saying they were working on my order and about 30 minutes later I was logging in to my new server!
The site is live now at “korpus-sundhedspark.dk (KORPUS Sundhedspark, Danmarks største og mest ambitiøse sundhedsbyggeri i miljørigtige rammer – netop overfor Køge Sygehus)”:http://korpus-sundhedspark.dk (in Danish).
Jesper Hvirring Henriksen
hvirring.dk 