Using Radiant as a blog

This is a work in progress.

This is a quick run down of extensions used to publish blogs with Radiant. However, Radiant is a very flexible system and there are other ways of doing things.

Basic Blog Features

• Articles
• Comments
• Tags
• Post to Post Navigation

Articles

The simple approach to using Radiant as a blog is to create one page with a page type of Archive and add a child page to the archive to create a new post.

A simple set up would result in a page structure like this:

• Home
  • About (Not blog post)
  • Articles (Archive page type)
    • %B %Y Archive (Archive Month page type)
    • Post 1 (blog post)
    • Post 2 (also blog post)
    • …
  • Etc.

You can then use something like this to link to your monthly archive pages:

<ul>
  <r:find url="/articles/">
    <r:children:each order="desc">
      <r:header>
        <li><a href="<r:date format="/articles/%Y/%m/" />"><r:date format="%B %Y" /></a></li>
      </r:header>
    </r:children:each>
  </r:find>
</ul>

And then use something like this on your home page to pull in your most recent posts:

<r:find url="/articles/">
  <r:children:first order="desc" by="published_at">
    <!--Display your entire first post here-->
  </r:children:first>
  <r:children:each order="desc" by="published_at" limit="4" offset="1">
    <!--Display partial posts here (I use a summary/excerpt page part) -->
  </r:children:each>
</r:find>

and something like this in the body of the %B %Y Archive page:

<r:archive:children:each order="asc">
<div class="entry">
  <h3><r:link /></h3>
  <r:content />
  <r:if_content part="extended"><r:link anchor="extended">more&#8230;</r:link></r:if_content>
  <p class="info">Posted by <r:author /> on <r:date format="%d %b %Y" /></p>
</div>
</r:archive:children:each>

The simple blog template has this archive structured setup by default. It is a good starting point, and worth at least playing around with.

If you intend to blog on specific categories and would like to navigate each category’s archive separately Sean Cribbs has a nice technique. Note: Sean’s technique requires the installation of the aggregation extension.

Comments

Refer to the Comments Extension page for more information.

Tagging

Refer to the Tags Extension page for more information.

Next/Previous Radius Tags

You have multiple options for navigating between blog posts.

Blog Tags Extension

The Blog Tags extension creates next/previous tags for each blog entry.

Refer to the Blog Tags Extension page for more information.

Siblings Tags Extension

The Siblings Tags extension does a similar task but sets them in a namespace of siblings:next and siblings:previous (as well as other tags).

Refer to the Siblings Tags Extension page for more information.

Blog Extension

The Blog extension takes the features of siblings_tags, adds to them and provides a way to loop through each page by author.

Refer to the Blog Extension page for more information.