QuickPublish: a small Radiant extension to quickly publish your pages

Paolo — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 20:45:00 -0500

As you probably know we’re doing a cool rails workshop in about 2 weeks. We’ve really packed up a lot of information in that workshop and in order to be able to do everything in a single day we need our students to waste no time.

What we discovered in past workshops is that we could speed up the pace if only our students could easily remember syntax or code fragments. Of course that’s not possible, we cannot ask them to remember by memory a hundred methods a day.

They need a way to cut and paste snippets of code whenever they want to. They need a quick reference without the hassle of asking the teacher “excuse me, can you get back to that slide? I don’t remember how to…”

That’s why we set up a support site they’ll be browsing during the workshop. When they need to do something we already explained, they’ll just browse the right section and they’ll find all the relevant information to complete their task.

This website (available only to workshop students) is built with Radiant and it’s pretty simple. It contains a list of pages (one for each covered topic) we’ll walk trough during the workshop, and there’s a nice sidebar with links to those pages.

What’s the problem in it? Students like to skip forward pages. They browse this support site and start reading advanced topics without having mastered the basics concepts. This has proven to be a waste of time. We need them to listen to us. In order to keep them focused on the right page we decided to hide/publish pages during the workshop. This way they can only see what’s important in a given moment (and of course what we’ve done before).

So what? Well.. I get bored pretty quickly :-) I didn’t like to go inside each page’s detail in order to publish or hide it. Imagine when I want to start over and need to hide every page… It’s a very tedious task.

Solution? In a few minutes I set up a Radiant extension which provides a new page, listing all the nodes in my Radiant site. From this page I can quickly publish/hide contents during my workshops!

How does it look like?

How can you install it?

Enter your radiant site root folder and do:

$> cd vendor/extensions

then download the extension with:

$> svn co svn://svn.seesaw.it/radiant_extensions/trunk/quick_publish quick_publish

Now restart your webrick/mongrel and you’re all set!

I don’t know if that’s useful if you’re not running workshops like I am, but, who knows… Enjoy!

SeeSaw's blog: QuickPublish: a small Radiant extension to quickly publish your pages

QuickPublish: a small Radiant extension to quickly publish your pages

How does it look like?

How can you install it?