After nearly half a year of heavy development, Radiant 0.7.0, a content management system built on the Ruby on Rails framework, was released this past weekend. This newest version delivers a nice set of new functionality and backend improvements that are sure to make it even more appealing to small teams with basic content management needs.By design, Radiant has a fairly limited set of base functionality, although it can be easily expanded with an impressive library of extensions. The team behind Radiant clearly has simplicity and ease of use in mind, as administrators will find just three basic components: pages, snippets and layouts. Pages contain the actual content in a Radiant-powered site, while snippets are used for content that's reused in multiple places throughout the site. Layouts define the look and feel.

Radiant 0.7.0, code named Intaglio, doesn't mess with this basic approach, but instead focuses on broadening its support for recent versions of Ruby on Rails (Rails 2.1.2 is included and Ruby 1.8.7 is now supported), as well as a number of improvements to performance, the underlying database templates and extension support.

Radiant probably isn't the right solution for an organization looking for a full-featured enterprise content management system, but for a group with basic content management needs that's already comfortable using Ruby on Rails, it may just be the perfect fit - give the live demo a try to find out.

Ruby on Rails has rapidly gained popularity over the past few years as an excellent framework for quickly building slick Web 2.0 sites and applications, and Radiant was clearly built in the same spirit. I'll be watching its progress with interest.