Instead of having a Mura link that says http://www.yoursite.com/siteid/index.cfm/about-us, I want it to be:

http://www.yoursite.com/about-us

Nice, and clean for SEO.

In Mura, if you edit /config/settings.ini.cfm and set

siteidinurls=0
indexfileinurls=0

Now, Mura will render the links without the siteid or index.cfm.

Just one problem, it seems Apache still needs the reference for index.cfm… enter rewrite rules and Apache’s mod_rewrite library.

This has been giving me a bit of grief (it didn’t work instantly in 1.2 seconds) and no real time to figure it out. Apache for some reason seems to ignore .htaccess files in a folder, on both Windows and Linux servers.

Where I should be able to put the following code into an .htaccess file in the root folder of my Mura directory:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-d
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9/-]+)$ /index.cfm%{REQUEST_URI} [PT]

The .htaccess file seems to get ignored.

The temporary fix I have in place is to modify it directly in the virtualhost declaration in my httpd.conf or virtualhosts conf file depending on how your Apache is configured.  Just place the rewrite rules right inside the <virtualhost> </virtualhost> tags as follows

<VirtualHost *:80>

        ServerAdmin help@yoursite.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/html/yoursite.com (Or a windows path of your choice)
        ServerName www.yoursite.com
        ServerAlias yoursite.com
        ErrorLog logs/yoursite.com-error_log
        CustomLog logs/yoursite.com-access_log common

        RewriteEngine On
        RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-d
        RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9/-]+)$ /index.cfm%{REQUEST_URI} [PT]

</VirtualHost>

This seems to work well so far, let’s see how it goes.  Next, is getting the rewrite rules working correctly using ColdFusion and Railo’s built-in web servers, so my server and development environment will be the same.

P.S., if you’re looking to get the same working with CF/Railo and IIS, check out this great guide on how to enable rewrite rules for IIS so you can use the rule in this post.  Thanks to the cfwheels team for putting this together, it’s a really well written guide.

The Mura show has been a big help for me in both of it’s formats when there’s a set topic and open help for anything I’ve been working on.  Several times I learnt to solve or avoid problems I didn’t know I’d be having when someone else asked.

I’m going to walk through a basic introduction to using the Mura FW/1 Template Plugin.  It’s been recently re-written and provides some cool functionality.

I know my own experience when learning Mura to want to know “how does this all work so I can quickly start playing around with it”.. and that’s what I hope to share in my time.

If your’e interested  Mura Show #46 covers how to build a plugin from scratch and will probably give more detail than what I’ll be getting into.

Tomorrow’s show will assume a basic OO / MVC understanding as well as some Mura concepts.  We won’t go in detail to how FW/1 works and be mostly focusing on how to build something with the goodness that is already in place.

2 PM Mountain Standard time, 1 PM Pacific. Â

http://www.getmura.com/support/mura-show/

1) Mura’s public side (admin, built in display objects) is kind of legacy code. The code is well written and pretty straight forward to follow, but some of the conventions you might get used to on the plugin side of things aren’t quite the same. Fingers crossed that this can all be written as FW/1 logic eventually, but in the meantime, just know that tracing through display objects will be different than working on your own plugins.  I ran into this mostly when trying to create a custom login process and saw a difference.

2) Built-in Mura CMS forms generally post to themselves. When modifying built-in form sets like the Paypal integration, there’s obviously more to it.

3) When the form posts to itself, they can look for a value such as form.submitted to be defined before processing the form results.  If you’re used to having separate files, self-posting forms offer a nice degree of simplicity and encapsulation of logic when customizing Mura, it’s definitely worth trying out and getting used to.

4) If you want to decide where the form should go after the form, be sure to include a hidden field in the form called redirect_url, such as

<input  name = "redirect_url"  type = "hidden"  value = "/[siteid]/different/page" />

That’s it for now.  I’m pretty sure I’ve missed a few things and will update this post as it comes up.

One example is caching.  When it comes to making every browser do the same thing (not cache a page), we end up with a number of commands that need to be placed at the top of a page only when it shouldn’t be cached.

Here’s some tags that could belong in the head tag of a specific page… (I’m sure this is already accomplished much easier/better with the built-in cache-o-matic in Mura, I just want to illustrate adding code to the header file..

<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1">

For this example, if I was going to add something like this in between the HEAD tags, I might edit dsp_edit_profile.cfm and see if they show up in my HTML.  I’m arbitrarily picking this file because it’s one I’ve spent some time in recently.

First, I’m going to make a page called NoCacheHeader.cfm and place it in my [siteid]/includes/display_objects/custom/ folder.

Inside NoCacheHeader.cfm I placed the following code.

<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="-1">

Now, inside my [siteid]/includes/display_objects/custom/dsp_edit_profile.cfm (which I copied there to customize it), I’m going to reference this include file.

 <cfset addToHTMLHeadQueue ( "custom/noCacheHeader.cfm" ) />

What seems really neat about the snippet above is it didn’t work when I simply specificed noCacheHeader.cfm as the file.. but I put in a partial path and Mura CMS located it leading me to believe Mura, in fact finds it magically for you

One last thing I noticed in the dsp_edit_profile.cfm is a command that loads the javascript BEFORE the customizations.  You can edit this however you like in this file, however in other places in Mura, it might be worth paying attention to whether you’re adding your custom code (be it javascript, etc) before or after what’s already being loaded by MuraCMS.  The lines of code that lead me to this were:

<span><cfset</span> loadJSLib<span>()</span><span>>
</span><cfset addToHTMLHeadQueue("htmlEditor.cfm")>
<!--- in this case, I Added my noHeaderCache.cfm AFTER these commands --->
<cfset addToHTMLHeadQueue("custom/noCacheHeader.cfm") />

Often, we’ll see http://www.mysite.com/siteid/index.cfm?display=something on our public site, say, when creating a new user profile.

Once the user creates their account, we’d like a way for them to log out.  You can work out a link in the menu bar, or on a protected page / header that includes the following link..  All that’s truly necessary is everything after the ?=..

When we want to log out that particular user, simply place a

index.cfm?doaction=logout

and the current logged in user will be logged out.

There’s a few things I’ve come across that most often are worth understanding from a high level while migrating from Windows to Linux:

1. So sensitive. Remember ColdFusion was case in-sensitive in Windows…?  Well, it still kind of is.. except where the code breaks.
2. Picky about paths. Remember not taking the time to learn how to properly program your file paths for uploads / directories? .. It might be time to repay that technical debt.
3. Third Party Libraries – Some custom tags you may have made or purchased might only work on Windows, and not Linux.  There should be a ColdFusion equivalent that works on Linux, and if not, you can likely find a Java version that you can quickly create a CFC wrapper for.
4. Database – Make sure your database works in linux how you need, first.

There are a few tricks that I’ve seen that may help avoid, or minimize a good code sweep… or:

1. Linux VFAT. A friend did away with this issue altogether by creating a VFAT (Virtual FAT) partition in linux and simply copying the windows files there.  No path, case sensitivity issues — all gone for the most part.  Only downside is the VFAT partition is another virtual hard drive, with a fixed size to my knowledge.
2. The Tomcat/J2ee option. Your ColdFusion application can be compiled to a .WAR, .JAR or .CAR, and uploaded directly into a J2EE server like Tomcat, Resin,etc.  What does this mean?  It might make some (not all) things simpler when moving your app this way.
3. Patches. Depending on any issues you run into, look into all of the appropriate ColdFusion Patches, Updates, and Hotfixes.  Make sure your Java is patched and updated (as it should be in Windows anyways)

Most importantly I’ve learn the following about writing code that will truly run in any flavor of ColdFusion:

1. Learn to work with ColdFusion’s functions and variables for paths. They are our friends
2. Use your IDE to enforce case sensitivity. Chances are you are sophisticated enough of a developer by the time you’re making the jump from Windows to Linux that this isn’t that big of a deal.
3. Put the horse in front of the horse. Once possible, especially for new projects, develop in Linux first and then deploy to windows.  Even OS X is a big help to develop in, but it’s not as picky out of the box about case sensitivity, etc.  I have a few projects where I installed Railo/ACF on the Linode first, and then developed directly to it…. all of the problems above tend to sort themselves out, and maybe leave you with a few challenges if you’re used to doing some things on the Windows server directly.

Have any other tips / experiences?  This list is meant to be a note-to-self without getting into the technical side of things too much. Share them below!

It’s interesting looking back at all I wrote in 2010 and with the perspectives I ended up with at the end of 2010.

Here’s where I ended up:  ColdFusion + Mura CMS + FW/1 Plugin Bundle = My web development nirvana.  I haven’t been this happy with developing in years.  It’s like discovering how easy ColdFusion made everything all over again, 12 years later.

How did this happen?

First, my discovery and adoption of Mura CMS to build web applications.  I know, that might sound a little strange on first read.  I’ve developed many web applications with several ColdFusion frameworks over the years.  Last year I got into built a few apps with it.  ColdBox was amazing.  The problem with me?  Most of the projects I worked on didn’t get to use or leverage the amazing features Luis has put into ColdBox.  It was like having the greatest swiss army knife ever, and not having enough uses for all the tools.  If there’s anything I like doing, it’s using features that make life easier. While I work on some very complex apps, any good framework for ColdFusion can handle it all pretty well. ColdBox was really becoming an issue of preference and wanting a new way to enjoy ColdFusion.  I hope to be able to use ColdBox one day.. but for now I think it’ll be on the shelf and I’m very happy to use it for existing projects.

As part of my framework search last year, I came across Mura CMS by Blue River Interactive and Framework One (FW/1) by Sean Corfield.  Individually, both were really impressive.  Mura CMS was what I dreamt Far Cry CMS was a few years ago.  Easy to install, easy to use, easy to extend and customize.  I could just kind of get things done.  It even had a Wordpress quality installer.  Great, I could use this for a few basic websites that came up and enjoy it.

There was one thing missing for me.  It’s always been missing in everything.  I’ve always had a desire to do as much of my web application development, be it for clients, or my own projects in one way, in one technology, framework, etc.  On one hand, I had ColdBox which let me build great apps, and on the other hand Mura CMS let me create great front ends for my clients to manage. Mura CMS has a wonderful plugin architecture, let me build a quick few plugins.. but it required more thought and learning if I wanted to build apps with it.

Oh, existential crisis.  I want both, in one place!

During this great time of pain from being, so close, I reached out to Blue River.  Not surprisingly, the guys heard me out and shared some great insights.  I was was introduced to Grant Shepert by the Mura team, and he ended up being a few blocks away from me and knew oodles about Mura CMS.  Grant has a great blog on Mura CMS, and while some of it is pretty detailed, it has to be some of the most enjoyable ColdFusion reading I’ve done in a while just from what he was uncovering and making possible in Mura.  I asked Grant if he would be so kind to answer a few questions of “how do I best do this”.. when there were a few ways to do a task in Mura and after that, I was sold.

I heard at the time that there was a Framework One “base application plugin” for Mura that you could use to create more complete applications, bundled as a Mura Plugin.  Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of empty hope before.  The key insight that Grant opened my eyes to was how he was building applications inside Mura.  Grant sat with me and my suspicions were confirmed.  Mura has CMS’ down right, and it’s FW/1 integration for plugins has a ton of power, but stays out of the way to let me build applications, thanks to how FW/1 is conveniently designed.  I highly recommend Grant’s base FW/1 plugin to build apps, it’s a bit tweaked from the one in the plugin store.

Since that time, I’ve delved deeper into Mura’s underpinnings and decided I’ll be centering a great deal of my time and life in Mura for my professional and personal projects.  Mura is a wonderful project in it’s own space, like ColdBox, FW/1 and many others.  Mura is open source, has a good team developing it, and a growing community.  The only thing I wish for is a bit more in the way of documented examples, but resources like the forum and Mura Show have been a great help to get direct help while those things develop.  I’m hoping to share my journey as well from the startup perspective of how it helped me bootstrap and launch quicker.

Today I’m standing in 2011 with another 3 new projects starting, all to be developed fully in Mura.  I feel for the first time in a long while that I’ve found the best balance of technology (ColdFusion) with a platform (Mura) and framework (FW/1) that I think I’ll be happily be able to build for a long, long time without needing much more.

This year you’ll see a few plugins put out pertaining to the small SaaS startups I’ll be launching.  Thats right, plural.  I think I can do more than one.  It’s time to show what ColdFusion can get done with a great cms like Mura can get rid with the boilerplate app logic that ends up consuming so much time after the proof of concept is completed of a SaaS startup idea.

Inward, onward, and upward!

All of the links in the code are surfable. You just drill in through the includes between all of your files. Very cool.

I wonder if there’s an extension to do this in CfBuilder, or from the Eclipse world?

Over the years I haven’t been much of a user of RDS anyways so I usually just left it disabled.

Lately though RDS is starting to have a lot more value to me, I have been using ColdFusion’s Report Builder a lot more in addition to ColdFusion Builder itself, which use RDS a lot more to expose a lot of neat functionality.

ColdFusion Report Builder lets you connect and browse your ColdFusion data sources to build your report either through wizards, or construct (and test) your queries in real time.  Since ColdFusion Report Builder is from what I can tell, a repackaged Jasper Reports binary, it’s actually really nice to have a lot of the CF shortcuts built in.

ColdFusion Builder is something I’ve been using more and more in the past year.  I started slowly with the betas as the CFEclipse worked just fine for me.  As ColdFusion 9 came out though, a lot changed.  The integration between ColdFusion Builder and CF 9 is great.

I ended up having to find a mechanism to enable and disable (if needed) RDS.  Searched high and low, and forgot to check the knowledge base over at Adobe.

Lo and behold the explanation is simple:

1. In the root of your coldfusion path, you have a /wwwroot folder.  inside of it there is a file called web.xml
2. This file is used with the configuration of ColdFusion itself, and not only the internal web server.  So if you use another web server like IIS or Apache, this file is still relevant to edit.
3. When you open up the web.xml to edit, you’ll need to search the text for “RDS” and un-comment two spots where there are RDS services <!– commented out –> .. Both must be un-commented.
4. After you remove the comments and save the file, simply re-start the ColdFusion Server and RDS will be up and alive.  Use the ColdFusion Administrator to set your passwords as needed.

AND RDS WORKS!  Reverse the steps to disable RDS on production servers.

Hope that helps, I know I’ll be back to reading this post when I forget in the future.  The knowledge base article to enable or disable RDS in ColdFusion in this technote.  The ColdFusion MX instructions are applicable to CF 6 and up: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/172/tn_17276.html

I’ve been playing around with the ColdBox Framework for ColdFusion for a few months.

What lead me to ColdBox was a period of discovering and playing around with the discoveries I made with ColdFusion 9 and it’s killer Hibernate ORM integration.

I could no longer program, ever again until ColdFusion 9 came out.. it made for a slower fall on new projects.  I decided to dust off the old exploration cap and started looking at what was new and developing in the ColdFusion world.

For about as long as I can remember I’ve been using FuseBox and my own frameworks prior to it coming into existence. In my modified FuseBox framework I have a simple, efficient, scalable system that has easily handled anything I’ve thrown at it, and more.  It’s very capable and rightfully so.

FuseBox is ColdFusion’s first major Framework and went on to dominate and inspire a lot of change in the PHP world not only with FuseBox itself, but the other great frameworks that exist in that language and maybe beyond.  Sitting in the ColdFusion world it’s nice to see that the ColdFusion “power with ease” eloquence was able to help spread this kind of empowerment, as much as ColdFusion’s continued track record of doing the best of similar languages and frameworks. No offence intended to any of the other great CF frameworks out there — I just didn’t feel the itch to shop around because I felt I had the good stuff at home.

No language, in my experience, has focused on the developer and their experience as much as ColdFusion.  Happy developers make great software.  I like being happy doing what I do.

I came across ColdBox and remembered seeing an earlier version around 2006 that looked really promising. It looks like it’s been delivering on it’s promises.  In defense of my beloved FuseBox, I haven’t looked at the new version in a few years because the one I use has worked so well!

The first thing that struck me was the sheer volume of documentation available on ColdBox.

I couldn’t believe my eyes.  Someone, actually, seemed, to get the significance of, and anticipate the needs of web application development, and ColdBox was the result.  This was like Allaire/Macromedia/Adobe continuing to anticipate the needs of application developers with ColdFusion. ColdBox looks to this software architect to be the next shining star of ColdFusion, if it’s not already.  It improves both applications and developer’s lives.

We know that application development and application developers are kept happy in some common and unique ways.

At first, I didn’t believe what I was seeing.  Everything I’ve needed to touch or use, with respect to a web application and it’s framework, seemingly, conveniently put in one place.  Internationalization, no problem.  Need role based security?  No problem.  Want to add a doo-dad?  Decide if you want an interceptor or a plug-in.  Next question.

What is a software architect to do when something makes him blink?  Get a second opinion from the smartest developer he knows.

My friend is someone I’ve known for almost 15 years.  We shared a path in school but I went off the ColdFusion deep end while he continued learning everything under the sun… except ColdFusion.

So I asked for his unbiased opinion.  Which he’s known to give.  I asked him, find me every fault in this ColdBox and the language of ColdFusion compared to all the languages you’ve ever used.  As a developer completely fresh to this, tell me if something is better than this, and why, because I might want to switch.

Expecting him to correct ColdFusion, and ColdBox the same way he used to correct the professors, assignments, quizzes, exams, and TA’s in university, he came back convinced that ColdBox and ColdFusion is great for developing web applications.  Not to say something else wasn’t, but if he’d pick something ot build on his own he just might use it, especially with the open-source ColdFusion engines like Railo and Open BlueDragon.

So, I’m not crazy.  That’s good.

Here’s the thing with ColdBox for me.  It does MVC, really well, for the web, for web applications.  Yeah, I know Ruby’s got this, ASP.NET’s got that, and Django has something else that’s great.  I have used them all, either with new projects, or maintaining existing ones.

The thing  that happens with any project, over time, is that it either becomes one you want to work on more and more, or one you don’t want to work on due to increasing complexity to add or modify tasks.

We can argue it’s up to the developer to keep things simple, but inevitable the platform and framework play a huge role in what we do, or don’t have to do, or what we do/don’t deal with.

If we put all the languages, frameworks into one pile, there is one key test I use to see the value of any tool.

It is difficult to make the complex into something simple; and it is easy to make the simple into something complex.  Will this help me make the complex into something simple, without dealing with the language, or framework’s complexities?

ColdBox, with ColdFusion seems to understand that most of us have to build things that are solid, reliable and scalable.  99% of web applications that are remotely successful grow.  We need a way to manage that growth and keep the garden looking nice while it grows.

Web developers often have to solve more than simple problems.  We have to solve complex problems and make them simple.   There is little doubt ColdFusion is the best integration language for the web.  It simply does more out of the box than anything.

I have spent the last 2 days working in ColdBox and my impression is this.

I have been amazed at how much of an application I have built already in ColdBox.  Actual business logic.  Actual problem solving.  Actual “this will make someone’s life easier, more efficient and productive”.

What’s changed?  I didn’t build my own roles based security.  I didn’t have to integrate internationalization.  I didn’t have to extend a framework to do more (or less) than it did.  ColdBox appears to be a framework that can be customized easily, or left alone and just run.

To potentially have the best of both worlds (Rapid dev of FuseBox and the scalability of OO-programing), compared to what was out there before, is more than a little staggering to this software architect.  I don’t care to re-invent the wheel, I want to solve problems and help people that are forced to work with poor software.

Beyond learning the ins and outs of ColdBox, I am slowly realizing it’s feeling much like FuseBox did.. the next tool I will use for possibly a long time.  Just like ColdFusion made web development power with ease, ColdBox takes Web application development to a similar of power with ease.

ColdBox allows you to leverage ColdFusion’s rapid application development in such an improved way that I don’t think has happened in several years.  As much as Fusebox first came out for ColdFusion and then spread to PHP, etc., and pushed the bar so much, I think ColdBox will inspire as well.

What’s most impressive is that such a powerful framework has been kept, if I may, simple, relative to the complexity of everything it handles.  That’s something ColdFusion did first, and better than anyone too.

In the coming few days I will start a Quickstart to ColdBox series to catch my first impressions and experiences of piecing it all together, to help you see for yourself what ColdBox could do for you.