BlogCFC - Free ColdFusion Blog

This updated contains fixes for slideshow, renderer, mobile, and pods.

NOTE: The pod fix corrects a case sensitivity issue when creating / updating pods. This update forces all pods to have lowercase names. This is a go forward fix and doesn't auto update any existing pods. When updating a existing pod with an uppercase character in the name, a new pod will be created that is lowercase. The uppercase pod will can be manually deleted.

This entry was posted on June 10, 2011 at 10:39 AM and has received 1099 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

What is the BlogCFC renderer?

The renderer is a way for BlogCFC to display dynamically generated content in a page or post. The renderer can process just about anything that you can write a handler for, for example, putting in an rss feed result into a page or displaying a twitter search result. This sounds complicated but in actuality, it is easy to accomplish. It is almost like creating a custom tag but in a CFC.

To create a renderer all that is needed is to create the custom renderer CFC and put it in the render folder. After that, refresh the BlogCFC cache and it will be ready for use.

As an example, let's say that this is the blog page content as entered in page edit form body:

What would be rendered is this:

In the example above, "br_twitter" is the name of the renderer. The use of attributes is optional and not required. When BlogCFC processes the page/post, all attributes are passed to the renderer even if they are not declared in the CFC (attribute overloading).

Now let's go through what it takes to create that example renderer.

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This entry was posted on June 3, 2011 at 10:29 AM and has received 2731 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

This is a minor update, but fixes a pretty critical bug with notifications. Enjoy.

This entry was posted on June 2, 2011 at 7:06 AM and has received 1672 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

This update includes fixes to mobile as well as support for FAILTO in emails sent by BlogCFC. Note that this isn't 100% covered yet, but should be for comments. As always, you can get the bits from blogcfc.riaforge.org. For Mac users, I used 7-zip to zip the folder. Let me know if that extracts better for you.

This entry was posted on April 29, 2011 at 8:31 AM and has received 1183 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.

Today I released a very minor update to BlogCFC. There were two lines that would break in CF8. In CF9 you can var scope anywhere. In earlier versions of ColdFusion the var scope declarations must be at the beginning of the method.

This entry was posted on March 31, 2011 at 8:10 AM and has received 1057 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

BlogCFC 5.9.8.001 has been released. This is a very large update in terms of security. When I first built BlogCFC, I wasn't really too concerned about security best practices within the database. I stored all my passwords as plain text. That's wrong, but is not something I ever had time to fix. Rob Brooks-Bilson took on this task and has completely revamped how users are stored/authenticated. Going forward, passwords are both salted and hashed.

For existing users, it is crucial that you read the readme.txt file. Rob created a web based wizard that can update your existing user records. If you do not do this, you will not be able to log on.

Along with Rob's changes, the following has also changed:

• Fix some minor UI issues, like jQuery being loaded twice.
• Added the ability to quickly check all in the admin/list screens.
• Case issue in SQL for isBlogAuthorized().

Stephen M. has updated the docs to reflect these changes. I'll be updating the web site copy of the docs soon.

This entry was posted on March 23, 2011 at 9:48 PM and has received 1163 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Stephen Moretti had updated the core docs for BlogCFC a while ago, but I just got around to updating them online today. Sorry folks!

This entry was posted on February 15, 2011 at 12:41 PM and has received 1124 views. There are currently 2 comments. Print this entry.

So yeah - this took a bit longer than I expected, but the formal release of BlogCFC 5.9.8 is now out the door and available over on the RIAForge site: http://blogcfc.riaforge.org

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on January 20, 2011 at 8:00 AM and has received 1274 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.

Welcome to BlogCFC 5.9.8. This is an important step on the way towards 6.0. This release simplifies setup, removes some old features, and features a brand new skin.

You can download from SVN or the zip attached to this blog entry. I expect a "formal" release at the end of the year.

So - 2 minutes after I posted this blog entry I found 3 quick issues. Please do not download the enclosure just yet.

p.s. Ok - after some quick fixes, the zip now should ready for you guys to play with. You can also get from SVN.

This entry was posted on December 20, 2010 at 3:08 PM and has received 1272 views. There are currently 5 comments. Print this entry. Download attachment.

Last week I received the following email from Emma Taylor:

My name is Emma Taylor and I am writing from the Water Corporation Library in Western Australia. In 2007 we downloaded a copy of your BlogCFC software and installed it on the Water Corporation intranet. Since then I have modified it and turned it into a current awareness service called "Water News" that the Water Corporation Library uses to keep Water Corporation staff up-to-date on relevant news and research. To date over 240 Water Corporation staff subscribe to Water News, and it averages over 200 hits a day.

I have written about Water News for a conference paper that I am presenting at a national library conference in Sydney next year (Information Online 2011). The paper is entitled "Sink or Swim: The Water Corporation Library's experiences from diving into E-Services" and about a third of the paper deals with the creation of Water News.

I was wondering if you would like to read my paper? I thought you might find it interesting to see one of the uses to which your software has been put. Please let me know if you would like me to send you a copy of my paper.

Lastly, I would like to say a big thank you for creating BlogCFC. It is a fantastic piece of software and has made it possible for the Water Corporation Library to provide a valuable and popular service.

I asked for the paper and got permission to share it online. I'm cutting and pasting form the original doc (removing the images) that Emma sent me. All in all - stuff like this makes me very happy. As an open source developer, I often get thanks (and gifts) from my users, but hearing a story like this just makes me... proud. More proud than I've been of my code in a long, long time. Thank you Emma for sharing this!

p.s. One thing I want to point out here - I think their issues/modifications in terms of subscriptions are pretty interesting. I'd love to know if current users would want to incorporate some of this into the product.

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This entry was posted on November 15, 2010 at 12:45 PM and has received 2313 views. There are currently 0 comments. Print this entry.