I had pondered aloud about Radiant CMS in the past about Radiant CMS, a small and slick CMS.

After tooling around for about 45 minutes, here’s a mini-review:

• It’s easy to set up, and is, indeed, small and slick.
• Generally, it works well.
• It’s seemingly not meant for non-technical users. To get a basic templated page set up, I had to figure out layouts and pages. Easy enough for me, and pretty powerful, but not something a non-technical user would grasp at all.
• More advanced features aren’t that intuitive. For example, I’d like to have a “Snippet” that is a dynamically-generated list of the pages on my site. I can probably do this somehow, but I have no clue how, and the documentation doesn’t make it that apparent.
• The extensions provide lots of added functionality. Unfortunately, three of the five I attempted to install failed with cryptic errors. One of the five worked great (“settings”). The fifth, paperclipped, installs fine, but fails to generate thumbnails and doesn’t show any errors. There are several rake commands that need to be run for most extensions that I haven’t seen documented in any clear place.

Overall, it’s slicker than a lot of things, but it still feels like a rough-around-the-edges tool meant for developers and geeks, not ready for the sort of people that want a webpage but don’t understand this H-T-M-L concept.