Easter weekend didn’t start well - I decided to upgrade Joomla on one of my sites to version 1.5.1 from 1.0 and upgrade just totally ruined the entire site - content was lost, template wasn’t compatible with version 1.5.1. At first I thought that the reason is Dreamhost’s automatic one-click upgrade that I used, but even after manual reinstall Joomla kept giving weird “Fatal error: Call to a member function name() on a non-object in helper.php on line 219″ error in Control Panel, and legacy mode for old template didn’t work.

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A thought of reinstalling all modules and reconfiguring Joomla from scratch was simply too depressive, so I decided to try another CMS. As a Ruby on Rails convert and a strong believer in open-source ideology I decided to go for Radiant - open-source CMS written in RoR. It is still in beta (latest release is 0.6.4), but it is surprisingly stable and powerful. Take a look at the footer of www.ruby-lang.org - official Ruby programming language web site - it is powered by Radiant

Installation of Radiant was rather easy - thanks to this guide and my prior experience with RoR applications deployment on Dreamhost. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to actually create sites with Radiant - there are not that many tutorials available yet, so it is pretty much  “make by example”. Split into pages, snippets and layouts makes a lot of sense onse you get your head around it.

From my experience Joomla is an overkill for most of the small sites, and despite being WYSIWYG, it still requires a professional or at least a tech savvy to configure it. After Radiant is set up and configured it is no more difficult to add content there than to edit a wiki page because of its Textile support. But it is so much simpler and easier to use than Joomla.

I managed to restore the ruined site in a day’s time - fetched most of the lost content from Google cache, converted Joomla template into Radiant’s layouts and recreated the pages (well, it was a small site after all). First time I dealt with Joomla - I spent several days trying to figure out where are the settings that I actually need in the endless menus.

Radiant is clearly following “less is better” principle. If you want to try Radiant - there’s a live demo where you can do whatever you want with the content.