Entries Tagged as “ColdFusion”
Who Uses ColdFusion Anymore?
I went to a web development meeting a few days ago and when I mentioned during the introductions that I was a ColdFusion developer the reaction from others in the room was that of amazement. I think they were amazed that the language still existed. I'm not surprised really. It's actually a common reaction from developers.
Someone in the room asked, "Does anyone even use ColdFusion anymore?" I know that I see ColdFusion powered sites all the time, but for the life of me I could not recall a single site that used it other than MySpace. And honestly, that's not a shining example of a good CF site. Feeling a bit embarrassed that I could not recall some decent sites on the spot, I felt I needed to do a bit of research and compile a list ColdFusion powered sites. If for no other reason that to answer this simple question when asked.
So here is a list more popular sites that I know to run ColdFusion. If your wanting to find a more comprehensive list, GotCFM.com has a pretty large database of sites.
- AT&T (portions)
- Bank of America (portions)
- Boeing (portions)
- California Department of Toxic Substance Control
- California Department of Water Resources
- California Dept of Developmental Services
- CarFax
- Dallas Cowboys
- Doctors Without Borders
- Duke University
- eBags
- Ebay (portions)
- Energy Star
- Foot Locker
- Gamepro
- Georgia Tech Savannah
- Guitar Center
- Hasbro Toys
- HP (portions)
- Logitech
- Macworld UK
- Massey University
- Merrill Lynch (portions)
- MMORPG
- MySpace
- NASA (portions)
- Ohio University
- Pottery Barn
- QuickBooks Online
- Scientific American
- Section 508
- See's Candy
- The Economist
- U.S. Bank
- Ultimate Fighting Championship
- University Of Amsterdam UVA
- University of Maryland
- US Dept of State
- Virginia College
- Vodafone
→ Respond NowTags: ColdFusion · Opinions & Rants
CSS Naked Day
A few years ago, Dustin Diaz started a Web Standards movement aimed to promote web standards around the world. He dubbed it CSS Naked Day! A day when websites around the world strip out their css and show off their for a day.
Last year I hard coded a toggle into my website and totally forgot about it until I just happened to go to my website and find the css was gone. My first reaction was to crap a blue twinkie and wonder what had happened. Then I saw the alert at the top of the page telling me it was CSS Naked Day. Imagine my relief.
This year I decided to create a plugin for Mango Blog that automatically removed the css and added the notification message to tell users that it was css naked day.
- Plugin version:
- 1.0
- Last Updated:
- 2009-04-10
- Requires:
- Mango Blog 1.3+
- Auto-install URL:
- http://cssnakedday.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=action.download
What If I Don't Have Mango Blog
Since not everyone uses mango but may still want to participate in CSS Naked Day with their coldfusion powered blog I thought I would throw in some samples of my code from before the creation of the Mango Plugin. It's really simple but for a CF newbie it might be usefull.
Place this in your <head> and put your css files into it.
<!-- css files here -->
Put this code just inside the <body> tag.
What happened to the design?
To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.
→ Respond NowTags: Code · ColdFusion · CSS · Freebies · Mango Blog · Plugins
Configuring CF8 to use Google Apps
The biggest issue I have with running my own server is dealing with spam blockers, email servers, DNS servers, etc. For some of you this is easy, and a no brainer. I personally run from it like a screaming banshee. I use google hosted services for all my email needs. They make it easy, rarely ever have downtime, and the spam filtering is second to none!
Google works fine for sending email from my desktop mail client or through the web, but sending mail via scripts programatically has always been a pain in the butt in my experience. That is until today.
I started getting a lot of undelivered emails and decided it was time to look for another option. After much research, I found an article on TACFUG: ColdFusion 8 likes Google Apps. The article is incomplete and only shows some code for step 2. Not very helpful. I assume it had photos but they may have been deleted at some point. It lead me to my own testing and discovery so I guess it did help in some way.
Here is what I found. Google can accept email from your CF server but it must support SSL and TSL Connections. Coldfusion Server versions previous to CF8 did not support this. So If your using an older version of CF there is a workaround using Doug Boude's sTunnel method. Since I discovered that CF8 supports SSL and TSL connections, I will talk about that here.
Configure ColdFusion Admin
This is actually super simple and I wish I had discovered it before. It would have saved me so much heartache and pain in the past. Here is a screen shoot for reference.
- Go to the Server Settings for "Mail" and set the Mail Server value to smtp.gmail.com
- Set the Username field to a valid username in your google account.
- Add the obvious password for this account
- Lastly check the two boxes to enable SSL and TSL connections and submit.
Thats really all there is to it. Now when your server sends an email it will pass it off to Google for delivery and you will see the email appear in your sent mail folder in google webmail. Easy as pie!
→ Respond NowTags: Software · ColdFusion
Auto Install Challenge
A few days ago we saw a release of version 1.3.1 for Mango Blog. What is particularly awesome about this release is that it takes it up a notch adding features not found in other major blogging software. In particular mango blog now has a new system for auto installing plugins. No longer will you need to FTP a plugin to your site. Simply copy and paste the url for the plugin into your admin and viola! The plugin is copied to your server, decompressed, installed, and activated all in one shot! That is slick!
Although I think this feature is totally slick, I think it can be made even easier yet. Here are my thoughts. I hope that one you fine developers see this as a challenge and decides to take it on. Or you can tell me that I am crazy and to take a long walk off a short pier. Either way I want action! Then I digress. Okay, so here are my thoughts. Since plugins are hosted by the individual developers and not by mangoblog.org there needs to be a way to simplify the auto install experience to another degree. One thought would be to develop something like a firefox extension that allows you to harness the power of the Mango Blog API to add the link directly to your admin area. The next idea would require the developer to use javascript in the linkage to the plugin archive to automatically send the plugin url your mango admin.
My last idea and probably the most feasible one, would involve setting up a system that would allow developers to ping the mangoblog.org site when a plugin is released or updated. This allows mango blog to act as a central location for all the plugins available for mango blog. This central repository then acts as a hub for all the mango plugins moving forward. Similar to the way the overview page displays a notice for a new version of mango blog. The system could then display a message for those plugins that have updates available and offer the option to auto install the new plugin. Taking this a step further, users could then be given an option in the plugins admin to view what plugins are available for mango blog and install those that they need.
Taking the whole idea one more step into the future, mango might offer the same functionality for other areas of the system for example themes that could be automatically installed from the admin area. After all the code has already been written to some degree for themes offered through the mango blog site.
Thoughts? Ideas? Public Flaming? What are your thoughts?
→ Respond NowTags: Mango Blog · ColdFusion
Twitter Plugin For Mango Blog
UPDATE: A new version of the twitter plugin is now available for Mango Blog 1.3 Please see the new post for details and download.
Twitter, the popular micro blogging social phenomenon is taking the blogosphere by storm. I felt Mango Blog needed to keep up with the times. I was also working on a new theme that required a twitter sidebar widget. This meant I had to force myself to learn about the plugin system for mango blog. I was about to throw in the towel, call it quits and cry my eyes out then all of a sudden it started to "click". Within the next hour or so I fixed my plugin and got it working as intended. Hooray!
Features
I tried to make it as flexible as possible. Adding a few extra hooks for future styling needs. While I was at it. I added a custom javascript that automatically links @Usernames as well as hyperlinks in the tweet. Something the original twitter badge does not do.
Configuration Settings
I tried to make the plugin settings functional as well for future proofing the plugin. I added the ability to customize the H2 text that appears in the sidebar. Or you can choose not to show any heading at all by leaving the field blank.
Additionally, I added a location selector for the follow me hyperlink. There are three settings available: None for do not show a link. Below for displaying the traditional link below the posts, or Above if you want to link to a twitter logo or other graphic.
Lastly, I added the ability to specify the number of posts to show at a time.
Download Plugin
So here is it! My very first mango blog plugin! Since this is my first plugin, I would really appreciate your feedback, comments or suggestions.
Custom Tag Option
As a side note, I also have a custom tag version of this plugin. It's not as good as the plugin, but sometimes a theme might require something unique that a sidebar plugin cannot provide.
Thank You
Thanks to Laura for advising me on pod enabeling this plugin, and also for writing a portion of the installer script so that it's "Mango Certified"
→ Respond NowTags: ColdFusion · Freebies · Mango Blog · Plugins
