Jeff Coughlin's ColdFusion Blog - FarCry CMS

Will FarCry Change its Open Source License (CPL) to a Dual License Model with GPLv3?

Fri, 09 May 2008 13:28:00 -0400

There has been a lot of buzz this week when Daemon announced they were thinking of changing their open source license model from Common Public License 1.0 (CPL) to a dual license with the GNU GPL License v3 (GPL). I sat with Geoff Bowers, President and CEO of Daemon Internet Consultants, to ask him why they were thinking of changing to a dual license model. Check out the article on Fusion Authority and see what all the buzz is about.

Speaking at the Boston CFUG Tonight

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 15:05:00 -0400

I'll be speaking at the Boston CFUG tonight about FarCry 4.0 (6:00pm ET). If interested and you're in the area stop by to see what's new in FarCry (Sorry, it will not be broadcast via Breeze/Connect).

FarCry 4.0 Training Course Released Under Creative Commons License

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:17:00 -0400

Head on over to the Daemonite blog to get your hands on the latest release of the FarCry training course in PDF format. Now released under the Creative Commons license for personal use, readers will have can indulge themselves in 122 pages of FarCry goodness.

New FMRP Website Using FarCry 4

Thu, 09 Aug 2007 21:09:00 -0400

A few days ago I launched a new website for Middlesex Hospital FMRP (www.middlesexfmrp.org). The site is not fairly large, but does take advantage of custom types, form tools, object broker, and more. We really had to rush this site out the door to meet a tight deadline. From the imitial meetings, to content gathering and graphic design... we had only one month to design and make this site. To make matters worse, I didn't have the final CSS+XHTML in my lap until a few days before launch. So I wrote all of the FarCry code in record time. Unfortunately I had to code about 20+ hours a day and 2 days into my holiday/vacation, but I'm happy we met the deadline and got the site up and running in time for the FMRP recruiting event.

FarCry Core 4.0.4 Released

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 10:37:00 -0400

Early this morning FarCry Core version 4.0.4 was released. This is just the core/framework (not the CMS plugin). Although many plugins (including the FarCry CMS plugin) will benefit from this update. There were many updates in this release, but I'll highlight a few that interested me.

A Few Highlights

TinyMCE updated to version 2.1.1
Better Safari support
Ajax updates/fixes
dmCron updates
DB updates for PostgreSQL and Oracle

Changelog/Release Notes

Changelog/Release Notes

Download

Subversion Tag

Subversion tag

Special thanks again to Daemon Internet Consultants for another great release.

Another FarCry 4 Website Launched

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 13:51:00 -0400

Today I wrapped up the final code pieces for a new website (www.acmeautosales.com). Upon viewing the site we aimed at making the user experience quick and painless; getting the user right to the point (viewing the vehicles that are currently on the lot and for sale). However, behind the scenes there is much more going on. We're of course using many new features in FarCry 4.0 (formtools, object broker, extended arrays, etc), but there are a few extra tidbits in there to help make things easier for the client. When the client came to me originally they just wanted the website and a management tool to create and maintain the vehicle data. So we created a normalized database with many relational tables allowing for future growth (ie. A possible Advanced Search in a future release which can use the normalized DB for search filtering). Then shortly before the initial launch date they asked if it was possible to auto-import the vehicle data daily using limited CSV data. Long-story-short there is a massive import script in the backend which runs nightly. It takes the CSV file (with only limited data), runs it through a VIN decoding service (web service) and returns the data I need. Any images for the vehicles are uploaded and 5 different sizes are created for each vehicle (used throughout the site for various marking purposes). Whew, its been a fun site :). We are already planning Phase II for the site and couldn't be more happy (Phase II will incorporate more functionality and update some functionality we couldn't get into Phase I).

FarCry 4.01 Officially Released

Tue, 29 May 2007 10:23:00 -0400

Its official. FarCry 4.01 is officially released. Version 4.0 was quietly released a little over a month ago (A couple of the plugins weren't ready for their 1.0.0 release yet). Go to the downloads page and get the 4.01 suite which includes the following:

core (4.0.1)
plugins/farcrycms (1.0.0)
plugins/farcrycfximage (1.0.0)
plugins/googleMaps (1.0.0)

A special thanks to Geoff Bowers and his team and Daemon Internet Consultants for another great FarCry release. And for those of you documentation nuts, Geoff and his team have been hard at work. Much has already been published in the last few weeks and more is on the way.

I'll Be Speaking at CF.Objective 2007

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:57:00 -0400

I'll once again be speaking at the ColdFusion conference CF.Objective this year (last year was a blast). This year I'll be covering the new (yet ot be released) FarCry 4.0. A list of some of the sessions was posted earlier tonight on the CF.Objective Sessions Page as well as a mini description of my session. My session will be convering some of the new features in FarCry 4.0 including the new object broker, "formtools" technology, instant wizards and more.

New FarCry 4.0 Site Launched

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 05:29:00 -0400

Without further ado I am finally able to show the new website for Lowell General Hospital in Lowell Massachusetts (http://www.lowellgeneral.org) outside of Boston. As the title suggests this site is using FarCry 4.0 (beta). The website technically has been in development for almost two years, however the majority of that time has been content gathering and multiple meetings (it's quite a content-heavy site). The ColdFusion coding portion started in the beginning of December 2006 and launched February 12, 2007 (just over two months). Unfortunately the site was rushed (it was originally scheduled to be a 6-month development project) so there are a few quirks here and there that we're working out last-minute, but overall I am very pleased with the final result. And FarCry 4.0 made it possible. I didn't get here alone. Many people know that during the past 2+ months I've been working on this site pretty much 8am to 5am (including weekends... and yes I worked the holidays as well). A few people I'd like to thank are:

Mat Bryant (the brains behind most of the new features in FarCry 4 and who put up with my constant daily/evening/night owl questions)
Stephen Moretti (while the both of us continue to learn and feed off each other's ideas for FarCry 4)
The content team/editors at LGH (thanks for bearing with me as I broke the site code several times during development)
My family (who had a running joke about "Rare Jeff Sightings" because I was locked away in my office most of the time)
And many others.

webDU Conference 2007 March 22-23

Mon, 05 Feb 2007 03:39:00 -0400

Update: My apologies. In the blog post title I had May instead of "March". Please note the dates are March 22-23 2007. Hey, it almost 4 am when I posted that :). (Thanks Geoff for pointing it out!)

The guys at Daemon are at it again. This year webDU promises to be another great web technology conference. Speakers like Tim Buntel, Mike Chambers, Ted Patrick, James Talbot, and Charlie Arehart (to name a few) will be there to once again share their expertise in tools and languages we know and love. This will be the first year am I going to webDU (and my first year in Oz). I will be speaking on the new upcoming FarCry 4.0 Application Framework and some of it's really cool new features that have been added in this revision that help make FarCry development even easier and more streamlined than ever before. Oh, and if you get a chance make sure to check out the cool new mug shot of me put together by the awesome team from Nectarine.

New Extended Arrays in FarCry 4.0

Tue, 02 Jan 2007 02:42:00 -0400

An array property in FarCry allows you to have relational tables for your content types and have it easily configurable and managed from within FarCry.

Real World Scenario

Lets say I have a CFC (object) called products.cfc where I store my company's product info. To keep this example simple we'll say my fieldnames are productName, description, and price. Now my company tells me they want to have sale prices this month (in this case just price decreases) for different products. Okay, so I create a new object called sale.cfc. To assign the products to a sale object in FarCry I can do it in one line of code in the sale.cfc file like so... (Note: add the attribute ftJoin="sale" (where "sale" matches the name of the CFC file w/o extension) to take advantage of one of the new FormTools in FarCry 4.0 (more on that in a future blog post)) This feature has always been possible with FarCry (at least since I started using it in version 2.1) and will create a table called sale_aProducts. But wait a second... I just realized that I need to have custom prices for each product in the sale (meaning for each item in the array table, I need a column called price to override the default product price). Before FarCry 3.0 this was not possible without managing your own table (something FarCry has always tried to eliminate the need for). However, in FarCry 3.0 a new attribute came along called arrayProps. So I could use it by adding the attribute like so... arrayProps="price:numeric" (add more by separating them with commas) So now if I use that attribute I'll end up the following columns in my array table parentid, data, seq, typename, and price (my new column). This worked great and allowed me to add my new column(s) with ease. Unfortunately trying to manage the data in the new column price requires custom code/logic.

Introducing Extended Arrays

In FarCry 4.0 we set aside the "arrayProps" attribute and instead create a CFC named after the array table. File: <project_folder>/packages/types/Sale_aProducts.cfc

Now the data can be accessed as a native FarCry object and not just some SQL table we had to write manual queries and logic for in order to manage the data. We can even add more fields... heck, we can even add another array table to this array and the code will not get messy. This is a great new feature to FarCry 4.0 that I plan to take full advantage of and hope you find it useful as well.

FarCry CMS vs. Drupal CMS

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 06:15:00 -0400

Someone recently posted on the [FarCry-User] mailing list asking questions about comparing the open source CMS Drupal (which runs in PHP) to the open source CMS product FarCry (which runs on ColdFusion). Of course there are differences in platform support and price when it comes to comparing PHP and ColdFusion, but that was not his question. Cenk writes:

I am just trying to create a website for one of our customer with FarCry for latest 2 weeks. But today one of our developers used Drupal and created same site within some hours with lots of extra features. Now I need some tips to explain situation to our boss here. What would you suggest to me as argue tips? :)

Although I havent used Drupal I have heard great things about it. So I just took a quick peek at their features page to do a quick comparison. At first glance it does have a couple more features built-in. I see a polling tool, blog, threaded comments, and module plugin capabilities.

Drupal Features FarCry is Missing

I'll try to break these down. If I missed something its not because I am dismissing them on purpose, rather it would be my unfamiliarity with the Drupal CMS system (note to self: I should check it out someday. It really does look like a nice product).

Polling

There was a tutorial put out by Daemon on plugging in a flash-based polling tool into FarCry a few years ago. I'm not sure what happened to it. Needless to say, it should be easy enough to build one from scratch. But alas, Drupal has one up on FarCry here.

Blog

FarCry does not come with a built-in blog. It has been a request in the past by a few people, but please keep in mind that FarCry is aimed at the Enterprise market (which generally doesn't care for blogging on their corporate website). As for building one (a blog) it should be fairly simple. Drupal says that it can syndicate content from its blog module. FarCry has one up there in that it can syndicate any content object built in the FarCry framework (which should make it fairly easy to build a blog library in FarCry). Still, being that the blog is built into Drupal they have a leg up.

Threaded comments

Not sure what to say. I mean, with FarCry a tool like that should take about 5 minutes to build. I've never seen it requested before, but could see it being useful on the right website.

Module Plugin Capabilities

Although this has always been a feature in FarCry (called "custom types") FarCry 4.0 makes it even easier now. FarCry 4.0 (when released) will have a new feature called shared libraries. It's essentially an easy way to share and deploy custom types among FarCry projects (much like modules).

FarCry Features Drupal is Missing

Now let's point out some things that FarCry "might" have some advantages over Drupal (I say "might" because I am not familiar enough with Drupal and may be making assumptions).

Database Support:

Drupal says it supports MySQL and PostgreSQL. FarCry supports both of those plus 2 more (MSSQL and Oracle) covering more of the Enterprise market.

Searching:

Because FarCry runs on ColdFusion (and takes advantage of Verity) it has tools built right into FarCry that allow you to start searching your new custom type within seconds. Drupal's feature page isn't clear what it uses. It says that it is "indexed and searchable" which could mean many different things (like indexing DB columns and then doing simple LIKE searches in SQL). I'm hoping its something decent like Lucene (or better).

Module/Custom Type Build Times:

One of the great Features of FarCry (especially in FarCry 4.0) is how quickly you can make custom types (or modules). With the introduction of new wizards, formtools, and even scafolding in FarCry 4.0 we can now build custom types (modules) in a matter of minutes. You want to deploy a new custom type (module) on a page quickly? Try FarCry's built-in rules and containers in design mode. I have no idea how long it would take to design a module in Drupal (a lack of reading their docs on my part).

Module/Custom Type Deploy Times

Again, I have no idea how long it takes to deploy a module in Drupal (I'm assuming they have some neat tool to do it quickly). FarCry has a feature under the COAPI management tools to deploy a custom type (module) in one click (not too shabby).

The List Goes On

There are many more features built into FarCry that are not listed on the Drupal feature page (like XML export of any content type, or built in image manipulation like thumbnails, a media library, and more). But like the current FarCry site the features page is possibly out of date, so I would hate to make assumptions. In all reality it looks like the FarCry CMS website needs some content updating :) (especially an updated feature list page). And once FarCry 4.0 is released Geoff promises to open up a shared library resource section on the FarCry CMS website where people can share libraries (modules/plugins) like drupal, Typo3, and other successful CMS systems have done in the past (and hopefully have a social rating system where people can vote on libraries and post comments... one can only hope :)). Drupal looks like a promising product. If you're locked into use PHP I'd definitely consider it as a possible choice for a CMS. But if ColdFusion is still on the table, don't dismiss it as a contender just because it's missing a polling tool and a built-in blog (unless if thats what you're specifically in the market for). Those features are great markets for non-corporate environments, but alas it may be something we need to consider releasing as a pre-packaged library in FarCry to appease the masses.

Please Comment

As always feel free to post comments, but please keep the flame wars to another website. This blog post wasn't meant to say one product is better than the other. Both products are great open source CMS products that fill different (and similar) needs. I'll apologize ahead of time and say that if I said anything that sounded offensive to the Drupal CMS product it was unintentional and I still believe it is a good product worth looking into.

New Object Broker in FarCry 4.0

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 12:52:00 -0400

FarCry 4.0 (currently still in Beta) has a new feature called an Object Broker. It's essentially a caching tool for object types. When used you set a numerical limit on it (for server memory reasons) where when the limit is reached it acts as "newest in, oldest out". At the moment activating and using the object broker is undocumented. So for the moment consider this a good starting point :).

To Enable Object Broker

Edit any custom type CFC and add the following two attributes bObjectBroker="true" and objectBrokerMaxObjects="1000" (where 1000 is the numerical limit you want cached).

To Test Object Broker

Disable the object broker and turn on CF debugging to see all of the queries
Enable the object broker to see how few queries are required.
Try dumping application.objectbroker to get a look at what's being cached.

Thanks to Mat Bryant (Daemon Internet Consultants) for helping me wrap my brain around some of these features.

FarCry 4.0 Beta Released

Wed, 25 Oct 2006 03:24:00 -0400

FarCry 4.0 Beta (code-named Gonzales) has been released to the public for Beta testing (currently from SVN). So what's changed? This release was aimed at developer improvements (although the user hasn't been forgotten). Here are a few off the top of my head:

New Installer (you asked... you begged... so hear it is in all its glory :)
New Custom Type Features for Developers
- New object broker
- Form Tools
- Form Wizards
- Other cool stuff
New Client Features
- AJAX features for seamless user interaction
- New UI features like drag & drop and other cool web 2.0(ish) gadgets

Other things to keep in mind:

The current plan is to have the minimum CF version support be CF7. This may or may not change by the final release, however it is something you should consider if planning using FarCry 4.0.
Because this is a Beta there will likely be bugs.
Currently there is little-to-no documentation for Gonzales.
Please refer any Beta questions (related to bugs or features) to the FarCry Beta Mailing list.

New FarCry Video Tutorial: FarCry 3.0 - An Overview (Part 5 of 5)

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 15:53:00 -0400

The final part to this 5-part video series titled FarCry 3.0 — An Overview (based on a presentation I gave at the CF.Objective() 2006 conference) is finally complete. Part 5 completes the series by wrapping up the dynamic content portion of the presentation. I give examples of Verity search integration, RSS/XML content syndication, SES Friendly URLs, and wrap up with reporting features built into FarCry (Website statistics and user auditing). I also give examples of where you can find more resources to continue your thirst for knowledge in the world of FarCry CMS. If interested, I have also provided the slides from my presentation (slightly updated). You can download them in either PowerPoint (PPT) or PDF format. You can find a copy of the presentation files in the downloads section of my website.